PC gaming has never been worse than it is right now – Reader’s Feature

The Last Of Us Part 1 – there’s a lot more than one (pic: Reddit)

A reader is frustrated by the continued poor quality of recent big budget PC games, including the port of The Last Of Us Part 1.

PC gamers seem to have a bad reputation amongst console gamers, for having a certain snobbishness about their format. That and cheating so much online that people don’t want to play with them. I can understand that, the format does seem to attract the wrong sort of person at times, but I’ve been a PC gamer all my life and have rarely owned a console.

I do this for a few reasons, the superior graphics being one, but I also appreciate the modding and indie scene, as well as the fact that I’ve basically been using the same games machine for the last 25 years and, most, of those same games still work on it today.

After some rough years, a decade or so ago, PC gaming is supposedly enjoying a golden era at the moment, with more people playing than ever before and almost all console games making their way to the PC sooner or later (get Nintendo on board and it’s pretty much everyone). So why is it that recently, almost every PC game from a major publisher has been so absolutely awful?

At first I thought this was just Japanese developers having trouble adapting to the format, since they’re not used to it and as I understand it it’s not used much in their home country. But it’s not just them. I was going to make a list of recent big budget PC games that have been launched filled with bugs, terrible interfaces, and missing features but it’d be easier to list those that didn’t.

The Last Of Us Part 1 certainly isn’t one of them, I can tell you. It’s basically a PlayStation 3 game and yet it is so full of bugs I honestly think it was worse than Cyberpunk 2077 at launch. The lack of reviews were a massive red flag and sure enough Sony was hiding something, as the screenshots and memes showed a game that clearly wasn’t finished and was obviously rushed out to capitalise on the show’s popularity.

It’s now such a shock to find a big budget PC game that works at launch that I’ve taken to assuming they’re broken until proven otherwise. From the GTA remasters to Battlefield 2042, Call Of Duty, Returnal, and Hogwarts Legacy, if a game isn’t so broken it’s virtually unplayable then it’s still filled with distracting graphical issues.

And why is it always stuttering? All these games seem to have very similar problems even though they’re by completely different companies. I guess that has something to do with recent graphics cards or something but if the issue is that widespread surely that should mean there’s even more people working to fix the same problem? Instead it feels like no one is.

The most frustrating thing is there’s such a simple solution to all this: just delay the game for a month or two and add some polish. It shouldn’t even be a question. PC versions often come out at different times to consoles, so nobody would mind.

We need to get back to the time when releasing a game meant it was finished. You can add all the post-launch content you want but when I pay for that download I expect it to work. Not work with a few problems and only do everything it’s supposed to six months after launch.