10 Most Disastrous Releases Of The Current Generation

8. The Last of Us Part 1 (PC)

Concord Game
Naughty Dog

The Last of Us Part 1's Steam page boasts of its "beautiful yet haunting" visuals. To be fair, Joel here certainly fulfills the latter half of that remit. Beautiful, though...

Incredibly, TLOU's PC launch had even bigger problems than its nylon-and-charcoal-haired makeover of gaming's most overprotective father figure. Developers Naughty Dog - bastions of the highly-polished, incomparably immersive video game - somehow created a game that went out of its way to yank the player out of the experience. Frequent crashes to desktop, horrendously long load times and inexcusably jerky frame-rates turned one of video game's most moving narratives into a stop-motion tragicomedy where mannequin versions of Ellie and Joel battled through a reality literally breaking down around them.

Unsurprisingly, this avant-garde method of remaking The Last of Us failed to garner much in the way of acclaim, resulting in a bevy of patches and updates to make Joel and Ellie's odyssey more palatable for the mass market. Yes, we now have a PC version of the game we can actually play, but take a look at "launch version Joel" and ask yourself - what was lost in the process?

 
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Hello! My name's Iain Tayor. I write about video games, wrestling and comic books, and I apparently can't figure out how to set my profile picture correctly.