The Last of Us gets another hotfix, developers are 'closely watching player reports to support future improvements and patches'

The Last of Us Part 1 was in rough shape when it finally made its long-awaited debut on PC earlier this year. It gave us the blessings of Eyebrows Joel, which was pretty great, but not quite great enough to make up for the fact that performance was brutal and crashes were far too common: Nearly 9,700 user reviews on Steam currently have it sitting at a "mostly negative" overall rating, a very unexpected response to such a highly anticipated game.

A hotfix went live on March 29, the day after The Last of Us Part 1 appeared on Steam, which focused primarily on "stability and performance improvements and other smaller improvements." and Sony and Naughty Dog also said they were "closely watching player reports and actively working on a patch with more bugfixes, to be released soon."

The patch notes for that hotfix were effectively useless, stating only that it "fixed several performance & hitch related issues impacting some users." It also added "extra crash diagnostic information" to help developers track down certain issues, and said that "additional improvements and investigations based on user feedback are underway."

Reactions to the first hotfix announcement on Reddit were not widely positive, as many people said the hotfix did not improve the game's performance or stability on their PCs, and in some cases made it even worse.

A second hotfix went live earlier today, taking the game to version 1.0.1.6, and while its patch notes are similarly slight, it does at least provide a couple of specifics:

• Decreased PSO cache size to reduce memory requirements and minimize Out of Memory crashes
• Added additional diagnostics for developer tracking purposes
• Increased animation streaming memory to improve performance during gameplay and cinematics
• Fix for crash on boot relating to game save files

It doesn't appear to have brought about any widespread improvements either.

Some users in the thread have reported some luck improving performance and shader issues using the "Oodle fix," although the improvements appear relatively minor.

Developers said in the patch notes that they are "closely watching player reports to support future improvements and patches," and referred players to the known issues page at naughtydog.com for other issues. Those problems, which are still being investigated and/or worked on, include:

• Preloading shaders takes longer than expected
• Performance and stability is degraded while shaders are loading in the background
• Older graphics drivers leads to instability and/or graphical problems
• Game may be unable to boot despite meeting the minimum system requirements
• A potential memory leak
• Mouse and camera jitter for some players, depending on hardware and display settings

There's no indication at this point as to when a major patch for The Last of Us Part 1 on PC will be released. I've reached out to Naughty Dog for more information, and will update if I receive a reply. In the meantime, perhaps we can all take a moment to appeal to a higher power:

Thank you, Eyebrows Joel.