Editor's take: Unfortunately, it seems that bungled launches are becoming the norm rather than the exception. The Internet doesn't help as it affords the ability to launch today and tie up any loose ends tomorrow. It's the sort of behavior that makes you long for the days of old where developers had one shot to get it right and they didn't ship until everything was sorted.
Developer Naughty Dog celebrated the release of The Last of Us Part 1 on PC earlier this week but based on early feedback, perhaps they should have spent more time fine-tuning the port than planning their victory laps.
The Last of Us Part 1 hit Steam on Tuesday and has already amassed more than 7,100 reviews as of this writing. Only a third of the reviews are positive which leaves the title with a "mostly negative" average.
Skim through the user reviews and you'll find multiple complaints regarding the game's hardware utilization, overall performance, and instability. Shader compilation is another common complaint, with several folks claiming this process alone can take an hour or more to complete.
Perhaps the issues would be a bit easier to stomach if this weren't a remake of a 10-year old game.
Nevertheless, Naughty Dog is seemingly on the case. In a support document published last night, Naughty Dog said it was investigating multiple issues including lengthy shader load times, performance and stability issues while shaders are loading, problems related to older graphics drivers, being unable to boot the game despite meeting the minimum system requirements, and a potential memory leak.
The dev added it was working on patches and would provide updates as they become available.
The Last of Us Part 1 for PC was originally due out on March 3 but got pushed back a few weeks and finally launched on March 28. The standard edition retails for $59.99, and the deluxe edition commands $10 more. The latter includes a handful of in-game items like weapon skins and explosive arrows.