The Last Of Us Part I - The Stuttering Of Us

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I still think to this day, the original should have never been touched. I have criticized the sequel for TLOU, believing that the contrivances for its story felt like a meaningless connection to the original. Of course, Sony still wants to monetize from both ends, so they decided to give us, who were never asking for it, a remake of the classic.

Fully redone for the PS5 with a modern visual style, changes to the level design, new physics system, and added elements to the gameplay that elevates the immersion. Despite the high asking price, playing this game did feel that I was in the cutting edge. The kind that most modern games will have to catch up on.

Sadly, I got a taste of that in the PC version, I never got even more infuriated with a Naughty Dog game than I have now. It runs abhorrently in my rig, and mine goes pretty much above the recommended system. On top of that are the bugs, glitches, loading screens, and more. This was even ported by a third party developer, instead of Sony's in-house Nixxes.

From the moment I started playing it at release version, every red flag started to show up. Sony makes bad PC ports, but nothing as terrible as this. Would you have imagined playing a game which says it is shader compiling and loading up the game after an hour?

I've read reports that even when that is ongoing, the game would crash. It's been over a week and patches have rolled out fixing most of it, yet some of these issues still linger. I will put half of my writing talking about the game, as well as the technical problems.

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Being familiar with the game, when I was playing Sarah, I kind of wanted to get the idea around the moving mechanics and animation, since it did feel stilted by design playing from the console years ago. It's sort of the same here, and unfortunately does not go well on WASD either.

I am currently reminded about times when I am in the passenger seat or given the wheels at appropriate moments. Though, I have to admit, the prologue sequence really did sell me the atmosphere. So many minutiae of details from the way crowds screaming, being attacked, environmental changes, and the overarching sense of the chaos happening while fleeing for our lives.

I still get chills to this day after playing the prologue, it still remains as one of the monumental gaming moments out there. Because of the intense emotions and story pacing, encapsulated even more thanks to the updated motion-capture, and facial details.

However, the massive amounts of stuttering and in-game loading didn't help with the experience, and I've started noticing more shimmering around the character models, loss of detail on hair and foliage. Fast-forward to 20 years in the game's story, and when walking with Tess, the game tries super hard to run stable. Worse, cutscene video and audio delays.

I couldn't bother to keep going, so after a few days of waiting, patch 1.0.1.6 finally arrived, and the experience was smoother. About 20% smoother. The shader compile still ongoing after 1hr into the game, and this other mess, where inside a building, whenever the camera closes in, the textures glitch all over when I turn.

Pushed forward, and while I wasn't a big fan of the movement mechanics, getting used to it while looking around with the mouse helped me to look at the finer details. Even with texture compression, everything looks very immaculate.

I don't have a monitor with HDR, yet the color contrast adds this vibrancy and darkness that had me glued to the screen. I wanted to use photo mode to explore some of the levels closer, and get a better because of that.

I've noticed that when I was reading the game credits somewhere, two unknown people were directing the game together, and some of their touch just hasn't left a good impression on me. There was a point in the game, when entering a camp with Tess, that the camera would change to cinematic view with cutscenes. And this was brief, like 20 seconds brief, and pretty jarring.

There's also the point when I was looking at Marlene's mugshot, my OCD kicked in, and I couldn't help but see differences in the facial model. It couldn't just be me, though, right? Right now, 2hrs in, and I already miss Bruce Straley's way of pacing and direction.

The story is still the same, but the way it is told just loses some of the nuance and magic within. And right after killing Robert, meeting up with Tess is where the game was becoming more demanding for my PC. Right, waited again and another patch dropped in.

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Now, if there's one thing I did like about the movement animation, it is that it controls fluidly and that it is more grounded. They made changes to it by hybridizing both TLOU 2 and the original. Joel can't prone down, which would have been nice, but he crouches just fine. He's also old, so makes sense he's less nimble than Ellie.

As for the enemy A.I., the infected are aggressive and far more dangerous with adaptive behavior doing things they normally wouldn't and that adds way more tension. The levels are more spacious, providing lots of room to improvise.

Patch 1.0.2.0 fixed most of the issues till now, Joel would get wet despite not being in water before. No longer the case. Bugs and glitches are gone, thankfully. Performance issues still around. At this point, I've accepted Marlene's request and met Ellie.

After finally escaping the FEDRA officers with Ellie and Tess, we faced off with the infected, smack dab against clickers. Silent crouching approach is easier thanks to the visual information of debris on the ground. Died several times, because in some big areas, it stutters like crazy, worse when clickers start running at me.

Showing up at the Fireflies rendezvous and separating from Tess, I had to sneak or fight my way through FEDRA officers. Their A.I. has also been revamped and looks like they pay attention to way more things going as well. They'll also find different ways to flank me.

I had to hide using the fog of war to lure them out, before shooting them off. Being trapped by more than 2 of them is an immediate death sentence, as they'll surround and shoot me as much as possible. Again, more spaces in the levels allow me to adapt, though the stiff nature of the mechanics sure don't help. The mouse aiming compensates that by a lot, however.

So far, 3hrs into the game, 4 and half hours if you count the waiting and bug crashes too. This game is still far off from being fixed. That might take another week or so to make it at normal playable stage.

I use a Ryzen 5 3600, OC'd with an RX 6700 XT, and 16GB RAM. Installed in an SSD too, right after that 3hrs game time counted, it is still showing that the shader is compiling, gotten to around 50% even. I don't know what to say here, how is it that a Sony game does this poorly at release. Is this the new benchmark for bad releases?

It is a superb game putting aside the issues, but even with its greatness, the asking price is still high. This provides half the package that part II gives and yet, no PC port on that one. Even then, I wish Naughty Dog would get sued, nobody should buy a broken product like this and spend their few hours of the weekend they have left on it.

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