You’ve heard by now, of course. Sony’s unanimously adored 2013 stealth-action cry-along The Last of Us Part 1 has not arrived on PC in fine form. The performance issues are numerous and significant, and over a week on from launch, despite two patches from developer Naughty Dog and a driver hotfix from Nvidia, they persist.
It was supposed to be so different. The internet’s servers are heaving under the weight of all the Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal memes that The Last of Us TV adaptation has spawned, and this fortuitously timed PC release should have been our chance not just to play a celebrated classic in its best form, but to enjoy it as a companion piece to the hot HBO series of the hour.
It’s not that. Instead, it’s a battle against a shader cache that takes longer to load than even the most unoptimized console emulator you’ve downloaded from the darkest corners of retro gaming internet, no questions asked. That’s an indictment of quite how bad this launch situation is.
