• Naughty Dog has released a patch addressing “several performance & hitch related issues” for The Last of Us Part 1.
• The developer says it is working on more bug fixes that it hopes to release soon.
• Recent reviews on Steam point to better stability but issues still persist for a large number of players.

Following a disastrous launch that saw buyers fuming at the state of the game, The Last of Us Part 1 for PC has been patched.

As we reported on Wednesday, the highly anticipated PC port of Naughty Dog’s highly rated game had a “Mostly Negative” review rating. Players were left disappointed when the game frequently crashed, shaders took close on or over an hour to compile and stuttering hindered the experience. Much of the blame has been laid on the studio which ported the game, Iron Galaxy.

On Wednesday evening, Naughty Dog announced that The Last of Us Part 1 had been patched to version 1.0.1.5. This update was issued to address stability and performance, providing improvements for both.

However, Naughty Dog’s patch notes are incredibly vague.

The patch notes follow below:

• Fixed several performance & hitch-related issues impacting some users.
  • Note: Additional improvements and investigations based on user feedback are underway.
• Added extra crash diagnostic information to assist in investigating shader building related crashes and other common reported stability issues.

And that’s it. However, a look at reviews on Steam posted over the last few hours suggest that fixing the performance and hitch-related issues has helped smooth out the experience for many players.

With that having been said, the patch notes don’t address whether Naughty Dog was able to address the litany of known issues listed below.

• Loading shaders takes longer than expected,
• Performance and stability are degraded while shaders are loading in the background,
• Older graphics drivers lead to instability and/or graphical problems,
• Game may be unable to boot despite meeting the minimum system requirements,
• A potential memory leak.

“The team is closely watching player reports and actively working on a patch with more bugfixes, to be released soon,” Naughty Dog wrote in a support post.

This means that there are likely to be at least a few more patches before The Last of Us Part 1 is not only playable on PC, but an enjoyable experience as well.

Unfortunately for Sony, this is the latest in botched PC releases for ports of its games. The 2020 port of Horizon Zero Dawn for PC didn’t perform all that well at launch. Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves for PC also had performance problems at launch.

Thankfully, God of War wasn’t bad but if Sony really wants to capitalise on the PC market, it’s going to have to start exercising better quality control before games hit their launch windows.

Hypertext has been provided a review code for The Last of Us Part 1 for PC. As the review code was provided on release day (like all outlets) our review will be delayed. We’re hoping that with this patch we can have our thoughts in writing next week.