I’m sitting here writing this up now because, well.. I’m not exactly “playing” the game, yet I feel like I should share a bit of my own cautious tale to confirm all the cautious tales circulating about The Last of us Part 1 on PC.
It is among the worst PC ports I’ve played.. Not the worst, mind you, but it’s definitely up there.
And this is before I even get to PLAY the game.
I have a pretty decent gaming rig; above the recommended specs, in fact.
My question is this: Why is it going to take over an hour to build the shaders for this game?
What’s even more insane is that the developers clearly KNOW it’s going to take a while because they started building them the moment you launched it, it seems. Performance throughout the introduction, menus and more is just ATROCIOUS. I’m talking multi-second freezes with no clear indication of what is going on. I didn’t even know the shaders were building until I got to the main menu and saw I had 5% of the shaders built (and that’s after looking through the variety of settings available at initial configuration).
I’m sitting at 16% right now while I type this.
At this point, I don’t think I’m even going to have the time to play the game itself, and will instead have to come back to it tomorrow.
Oh, and another not so good sign: The control indicators to get through the menu? Most of them all correspond to a normal keyboard key; arrow keys, R, space.. And then the “back” key is.. Well, you’d expect “Esc”, right?
No, it’s just “Back”.
They literally forgot to change the designation for the key in navigation.
The Escape key functions as a back key, thankfully, without any remapping of controls. *update* Actually, the Escape key only functions as a back key in certain contexts.. In-game it apparently really means the backspace key, but that key doesn’t work in menu navigation for whatever reason.
I may have been a little prophetic when I noted the “Captured on PS5” screenshots on Steam.
Here’s hoping they get a patched build out soon that fixes the numerous issues folks are having..
..Or that Steam will honor refunds past the 2 hour mark because of the damned shader building.
*sigh*.. 18%.
*update* The entire process took about 75 minutes to build shaders and load a new game. This is.. Pretty ridiculous, honestly, so if you’re interested in the game, I’d suggest you wait for it to be optimized further; You’ll be blowing past the standard Steam refund time limit (2 hours) pretty quick thanks to shader builds, load times, and the game introduction.