Naughty Dog is perhaps the flagship studio under Sony PlayStation, famous for blockbuster triple-A titles like Uncharted and The Last of Us. Further cementing its reputation for technical as well as storytelling excellence in the late-stage days of the PS3, nowadays Sony is not only putting its biggest games on its consoles but also for PC.
We've seen this with its first-party developers porting the likes of Spider-Man, Returnal, and God of War. While Naughty Dog has brought the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection to PC, its latest port, of The Last of Us Part 1, has not been doing so great as it draws criticism for poor technical performance. In a blog post, Naughty Dog celebrated the PC launch of The Last of Us Part 1 with a significant detail about the studio's future plans.
"Developing for both [PC and PlayStation] empowers us to incorporate lessons learned from either into the overall design of our games", Naughty Dog wrote near the end of its post. "Sharing our stories and experiences on PS5 as well as PC is something that Naughty Dog has embraced and will continue to support moving forward."
What these lessons are exactly Naughty Dog hinted at in its post, and it sounds like there are significant challenges in bringing its games, which are optimised to the more stable platform of console, to PC. This can be seen in the problems many PC players are currently facing with the port of The Last of Us Part 1.
These issues range from freezes at random places to mouse stuttering to an interminable amount of time waiting for the game to build shaders, among other problems. Yesterday, Naughty Dog addressed players' feedback, saying: "We've heard your concerns, and our team is actively investigating multiple issues you've reported".
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"We will continue to update you, but our team is prioritizing updates and will address issues in upcoming patches", it continued. In its blog post Naughty Dog reveals how it approached development for PC with its Part 1 remake, and it's insightful to learn how small things, like the differences between thumbstick and keyboard and mouse, can make such a big difference.
"From a technical perspective, Naughty Dog's engine used for Part 1 was optimized for PS5. Moving it to PC meant a large amount of tuning, tweaking, and even re-thinking, especially when it came to how we utilized the GPU", Naughty Dog explained. Here's hoping that the studio will fix the PC issues for its latest port soon, while players understand that even a developer as talented as ND will face a learning curve.