The Last of Us PC Is Not 'Naughty Dog Quality', Developer Admits

That clip from Twitter has me in stitches.

Please skip PC ports. What a waste of time.

What a bad look. This coming off the heels of the successful TV adaptation. How many months, years did they have to prepare for this release?

I think it is just a unfortunate blunder on their part, but they will learn from this and assure themselves that something like this never happens again.

I can only imagine the difficulties of developing and optimizing for PC but alas, we all learn from mistakes and I am sure Naughty Dog will as well.

That's some Pokemon S/V levels of body horror!

Although Pokemon never crashed on me.

It's a farce really. There is no way their quality testers didn't catch this, yet they decided to release it anyway for their new favorite word: synergy. All of those apologies ring quite hollow once you consider that fact.

Horse riding Ellie is what the world needs right now.

Ellie looks like how people look after I've eaten some quality mushrooms.

Man that twitter clip is horrifying, if Capcom put that Ellie in one of their RE games we wouldn't be able to sleep at night anymore.

I hope this keep happen until Sony stop the pc ports.

@McBurn whenever a studio gives zero advance copies to the press it is usually not a good sign,

Of course ND quality still exists what kind of dumb question is that lol. No one in a few weeks is going to care about a busted pc port of tlou part one not to mention console players who already don’t care which is the main audience for ND. It’s not like this was the next big ND game that came out after years of hype and was busted for console and pc players and reviewed terribly. ND track record is still spotless imo one belated,busted pc port isn’t going to change that

@eagletrippin I’m sure Sony was the one that forced it to release like this

I believe this as much as I believe cdpr was sorry about the PS4/Xbox 1 versions of cyber punk.

it is sad that sony's usual attention to quality is now something we cannot guarantee. the moment they went the pc route, i knew this was a possibility — horizon zero dawn also faced some quality control issues when it launched on pc, but nothing as shabby as this. indirectly, sony is hurting its own image which took decades to reach in its current form. it is clear that no effort was put into this port due to the hellbent decision to release it on the coatails of the tv series. why naughty dog and/or nixxes was not put in charge of the project instead of iron galaxy we will never know. hopefully these bad habits won't trickle into sony's native ps5 games next.

@Tharsman it was a high bar to reach but batman: arkham knight (pc) would be proud of this effort. iron galaxy sure knows how to impress.

Oh my… 🫣
That Twitter clip is truly frightening. I think that’s Ellie….? Scarier than any Clicker ever was!!

Yea it is ND quality, it’s your ***** game.

For once I would like a developer or publisher to come clean and give the reason why a game would release like this.

Apologies are good and all — and the promise to fix the problems is mandatory — but it comes across as insincere, when there’s an almost 100% chance that they knew of the problems before they released it.

I mean, I know why it happens. The publisher set a release date that they wanted to hit for some financial reason, and they were going to launch it no matter what state the game was in.

With the attitude of “we can patch it afterward” and the game-buying public seemingly unable to wait for reviews before they buy it, this is gonna keep happening. We should expect better.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a game is finished before it’s released. And if they’re not gonna stop, they should at be honest and give an explanation for why it happened.

@Impossibilium agreed. This is becoming a widespread trend in gaming now, Port or not. There needs to be pushback on this, because as you stated it's a result of purely profiteering driven decision making. Whether it be to meet a deadline, or put the least amount of resources in qc, testing, "remasteraking" etc.

Reviewers should be also taking standard deductions based on unfinished and technical problem related release code.

it was clearly not ready for release why release games in this state ?

"Look at my horse. My horse is amazing."

This is a port of a remake of a remaster of a game from, what, 2013? Just.... How?

@NEStalgia greed!

Naughty Dog quality is still a thing... on PlayStation. As I understand it, this wasn't made directly by Naughty Dog.

This is what happens when you have a multitude of hardware options - a game never runs the same for one person as it does for another. That's why I game on PS5 whenever possible, despite having a perfectly capable gaming PC.

They didn't even release it at the same time as the PS5 remaster. Another case of a developer (probably because of the publisher) deciding to fix it later if players complain too much

@Tharsman That funny, because Iron Galaxy made Uncharted PC port. Which was not awesome, but it was fine.
This is Naughty Dog's work (they said it, not me), with Iron Galaxy "helping" with PC port.

@GodofCapcom Sony is not going to do that while there's money to be made. As much as they might value their user base's opinions, they value the almighty dollar even higher.

@Acurisur What?
This is from ND website: "As we began development in-house, we wanted PC players to experience an amazing story that truly lasts the test of time while maintaining the equally high-quality bar across both PC and PlayStation consoles."

You know what in-house means?

Also, Iron Galaxy is mentioned on Steam page of Uncharted PC port as a developer. They are not mentioned on Steam page of TLOU. Just Naughty Dog.

I don't understand why you are trying to defend them. The ***** up a PC port. They can learn. But they can absolutely be criticised for it. And we don't need to use Iron Galaxy as a scaping goat when they made Uncharted PC port that was better that is TLOU PC port from ND.

@OScube Didn't another studio do the PC port?

Still this hurts the brand so stupid.

I thought pc master race in games...
Al lot off games i see on pc are like this,
Or do people mean its the master race of broken games ?
My ps5 and xbox series have zero issues on games i play,
But the laptop i use every game has a weird glitch or performance issue ...

PC developing perks : 1)months of bugs/driver and glitch fixes,
2)nonstop server control to stop endless cheating,3) deal with piracy, 4)wait for a deep steam sale to move some copies.

Almost entirely worth it for that clip alone 🤣🤣🤣😂😂

@Revlis1989
PC is alot harder to develop for, to be fair.
The internals of every machine out there is different depending on what parts the gamer has, but with console, every gamer has the same internal parts for an entire generation. But PC can change within months of development starting.

@NEStalgia I'd assume that ND have forgotten how to build a PC game after Sony bought them.

I managed to complete the entire game without any major issues. Literally just one crash towards the end and a couple of very minor microstutter problems in a few places.

Then again, I’m on a top of the line rig. Although, I have read people with similar specs report issues.

That clip is from the original remaster on PS4 apparently, not the remake on PC. You can even see the console in the video.

@Texan_Survivor you are 100% correct and I've been saying this for some time. I believe it's not about favoritism to the developer as much as its toward Sony and other major platforms, publishers, etc. It's about backroom deals in the form of "understandings", and money in the form of marketing deals and early review code assurance.

Major third party and first party titles seem to always garner this special treatment. It's disgusting but quite obviously occurring.

The game review space appears to largely be biased and corrupt. Think about how quickly the entire games journalism industry had to completely do a 180 publicly when they realized they could not continue to gloss over the fraud that cyberpunk 2077 was at release... You go back and look at day one and the game was getting 8-10s across the board... Until it wasn't.....and those same "journalists" acting shocked and surprised, somehow now victims of the very deception they helped usher in.

For those of you begging Sony to give up on PC after this, stfu. I never would've played The Last of Us, Horizon, Uncharted or God of War (haven't gotten around to Days Gone or Sackboy yet) without their PC ports.

And no, I don't think exclusives are a good enough reason to get a console, exclusivity itself has lost all of it's value over the last 20+ years as the industry has become mainstream and the common gamer knows what systems they prefer.

And if these games great enough for Sony to make them first-party (which I think they are) then I want to play them at their very best, on PC with all the extra goodies like kb/M, ultrawide and high refresh rate and whatnot. I'm perfectly fine waiting for TLOU part 2, (I was never in the hater gang), GoW Ragnorok, Horizon Forbidden West and Final Fantasy 16 to hit PC so they can be at their full glory, provided the port is good, which is the real pressing matter here.

Oh and Spiderman and Miles Morales, those were amazing on PC too

@Texan_Survivor Its a nice conspiracy theory I'll give you that!
But if the game is truly broken maybe they wont review it until they can actually complete it? I dunno, but that seems just as likely as a bunch or journalists all deciding to cut ND slack, which seems pretty unlikely to me.... tearing into them would produce many hits which most journo's chase.

This is your 'proof'? A theory pulled from nowhere is not proof - you are offering the lack of reviews as a piece of evidence, not proving anything. Not saying you are wrong, maybe you are not, but you have no 'proof' whatsoever, just a theory.

...and tluo2 got the score and recognition it did, because by and large the people who give these awards are not full of hate for anyone different and not children who cant handle a difficult story. Though there are some who have genuine concerns about the game, the vast majority were in one of above groups.
I loved it despite its challenging story, and found it far more memorable than most titles I've played over the years.

By and large, free speech is alive and kicking here, but they have a job to ensure the site is welcoming and not a cesspit of hate. If you are referring to the Hogwarts review, I too thought that was the worst approach I've ever seen Push take and had to think about whether I still wanted to visit here. But that was one article, and I've not seen them display such double standards since.

@ArcticSin I hope you get better ports in the future.

@Texan_Survivor

Haven't you noticed that all major gaming websites are refusing to put their reviews on Metacritic even though the game was released for days now ?

Honestly, I chalked it up to Sony refusing to give codes to anyone until the game launched, but I feel like the game has been out long enough by now that everyone had time to review it. If the likes of IGN and GameSpot end up reviewing the game after it gets a patch, you might have a point there.

Dont MetaCritic have a deadline before they stop accepting reviews scores, though?

@KundaliniRising333

Think about how quickly the entire games journalism industry had to completely do a 180 publicly when they realized they could not continue to gloss over the fraud that cyberpunk 2077 was at release...

Thats a bit different, because the only version that was not complete garbage (most of the time) was the PC version, and that was what CDPR provided for reviewers, if they wanted a day one review out there, they had to review the only good version.

@Titntin

Its a nice conspiracy theory I'll give you that!
But if the game is truly broken maybe they wont review it until they can actually complete it?

As bad as the port is, the game seems to be playable, but again, they were not provided a review code and everyone had to wait until the game launched. At that point, many reporters tend to not even bother, there is no much traffic on reviewing a game after its been out a few days, especially a Steam release. They have a very good and visible review system built into the store, by now anyone that wants to know if the game is worth buying just needs to see the 45% right in the search results.

As for the Hogwarts handling, I personally think they did a fantastic job.

@Savage_Joe True, though I'm assuming they try to do the "remaster" by spending as close to $0 as possible and put the bottom tier teams on the projects. It's not that remasters tend to be bad so much as "remaster" tends to mean "cash grab while doing nothing but making sure the menu loads."

@Tharsman "As for the Hogwarts handling, I personally think they did a fantastic job."
I'd agree shutting down hate was excellent and I was very glad to see it. I just don't think they needed to preach a point of view at us and then not allow anyone else to comment. Keeping that cr@p out of gaming is the way to be, so they didnt need to virtue signal in their own review, and I feel it would have been better had they just stated that it was all off limits and left it there. There are many long term users here who were very upset at how they handled that and I just felt it could have been better. Still, its all water under the bridge now - thank god!

Pretty much agree with all your other points though..and thank god for steam ratings

PC master race indeed. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️😂😂😂😂

Sony and Naughty Dog should be utterly ashamed for how this port was released.

It’s inexcusable. If you make a commitment to release a game on a platform you need to make sure that release is up to par. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to be solid.

This isn’t anywhere close to solid. It’s utter crap. The only way to run this game is to have a monster 3000 dollar gaming rig. And that’s just unacceptable when the majority of gaming rigs are mid range or high low range.

Like look at the game’s textures on medium setting. It looks worse than the PS3’s versions textures. There’s just no excuse for it.

@Texan_Survivor I do Think that a select few like skill up and others are and will continue to be mostly unbiased and try and maintain that trajectory. However I think is long as things like mainstream websites or these video game websites rely so heavily on clicks and marketing money then we will never see a true Trend towards honesty. And I say that even with the YouTube influences.... like you see it where some YouTubers will not say anything bad, they won't say it's great that they won't say it's bad they just stya neutral as they don't want to because they worry about risking the loss of Early Access review codes as well so the industry knows that they have a Stranglehold on opinion based on that we see it just with this release where they didn't release code on a first party title Port because they knew it was not in satisfactory a release date before it was released.

It's such a widespread problem because everybody that could be honest voices for the community are somewhat enslaved to this fear of losing basically being on a PR list because that's what it is. Even look at digital Foundry if you look at digital Foundry in the last 6 months you will see that almost every game that has massive technical problems or at least moderate technical problems at release they don't post their technical analysis until a week or so after release maybe a couple days at the earliest because they don't want to risk getting on the bad side of that PR list by informing Gamers that they may want to hold off on purchasing and thus cancel pre-orders.

So honestly you know it would take a youtuber or other brave soul or souls in whatever medium to come along that only want to get the money that they get from YouTube views alone at the worst and player funded support at best. Perhaps even to the point where they gain enough notoriety that they don't even have to be enslaved by YouTube's algorithm and can just have a dedicated blog or website that is fully funded by the people who want honest objective technical analysis and reviews based on the game and not whether or not the overarching developer Overlord will or will not give you early access review codes.

Only then I think will you see like true honesty where they don't really care about whether or not they have the right ads or whether or not they get Early Access they just tell straight up truth every time and then hopefully enough people start to realize that so many are not being completely forthright that they wait and listen to these select few who may not have the earliest reviews but they definitely have the most untainted.

One can dream 🤣

@ArcticSin They were amazing after the multiple patches to get the game playable. At launch they were definitely not amazing with the extremely high CPU usage, game breaking bugs like not being able to take a picture of the Empire State Building, ray tracing-based crashing, texture artificing, people on laptops with NVIDIA GPUs getting significantly lower performance than what would be expected from their hardware... The list goes on, and this port was done by the highly regarded people at Nixxes

My brother in heaven, you know the state that the game was when you released it, you made it. i trully hope that most people get refunds for this, ND and sony dont deserve a single penny for releasing stuff in this state.

@GodofCapcom Honestly yes, if they’re not really going to commit and give PC players a good experience, why bother with this at all, they just irreversibly damaged Naughty Dog’s flawless reputation up until now and put a dent into TLOU IP right when it’s as its most popular, now every single port they make is going to be scrutinized for a good reason and the whole ‘PlayStation PC’ brand is tarnished now.

@Shredderlovespizza I don't even know why console gamers think that bugs, crashes and glitches only happens on PC especially after they experienced CyberPunk 2077. This is the developers fault and not the hardware.

When PC gamers ask "why is ________ console exclusive? I'd buy it in a heartbeat!" They can come back to look at this release and hopefully see why developers like consoles vs PC.

It really helps when your target market is all running the same one or two SKU. A bit more work if you're developing for two console platforms. A bit of a nightmare if you're developing for PC without either AMD or NVidia giving assistance.

Now, imagine you've been on one platform for 25 years or more...

@MattBoothDev there's alot more to this than just "consoles are easier to optimize for than PC"

@ArcticSin it's a good job I mentioned other things that are likely to be responsible, as well, like the studio having only published on Sony hardware for at least 25 years, which means they're inexperienced at building on other platforms.

Ultimately, most crappy PC ports do boil down to "consoles are easier to optimise for", though. It's a legitimate reason for a studio that usually publishes on multiple platforms, let alone one that's published it's first non-console game in working memory of the company (I can't imagine there's many people at Naughty Dog who've been around since before Crash Bandicoot).

I mean, I write software for a living. If you asked me to change languages or rewrite my code in a different SDK, the first iterations are going to be *****.