A member of Naughty Dog has come online to defend his company, and every other game studio, in light of the recent spate of poorly optimized video games coming to PC.
This would be Del Walker, currently a Senior Character Artist at Naughty Dog. Del also has prior experience with Respawn and Rocksteady Games. Most important of all, he knew about what was going on behind the scenes with his employer when they released The Last of Us Part 1 on PC in the state that it is in.
As reported by Tech4Gamers, he stated: “I promise you it’s not laziness.” It would be most helpful to review what he said in full, as well as what things he had left unsaid about this situation.
On Twitter, Del said:
“When making a game for a console, you’re making it for one set of drivers/hardware. When making a game for PC you’re making it for like 900+ possible combinations.
I promise you it’s not laziness. It’s just really really really difficult.
Something can really look and feel ready until you release it to millions of people. Developers are trying really hard, but it’s not easy when dealing with unstandardized platforms. Especially with how complex and graphically intensive modern videogames are.
There’s a bunch of exhausted men & women using weekends and evenings to get a Patch out for you. I only wanted to state this stuff is difficult and problems are often unforeseen. Devs are trying hard and will try harder in future.”
In response to a fan, Del also said this:
People are too upset to understand this part and I get it.
“The game can be running smooth on 600 computers internally but you just don’t know for sure until it’s out. Now 2% of a 50k people means you’re seeing something you didn’t anticipate and you’re stuck making patches.”
So, this case seems to have been a matter of Naughty Dog’s QA not catching the issues that came up for multiple users. It’s worth noting that Naughty Dog released Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection half a year ago.
That remaster of their games was also worked on by both Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy Studios. As reported by IGN, the two studios found a relatively simple approach, which was also the same approach Nixxes used to port Horizon Zero Dawn and Marvel’s Spider-Man. PlayStation’s games create shaders across one or more CPU threads, as soon as you load into the game. The idea is for the shaders to be stored in your computer’s cache, so that they can be called anytime they are needed.
These meant these PlayStation Studios releases on PC needed high end hardware to function at their best. However, the issues that The Last of Us Part 1 experienced on launch are essentially first- time jitters that a PlayStation Studio port has ever experienced.
We did not expect that this port would be experiencing any issues ourselves, but we have been reporting on Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy diligently updating the port with new patches frequently. Hopefully it will get to the level where it meets expectations sooner rather than later.
