Análises recentes de LIFSON

I'm enjoying it much more than expected. Its far from perfect, and there is some clunk and jank for sure, but the story is very compelling, the locations are interesting, the combat is actually more fun that I thought it would be. The writing is good, and very tone accurate for an Indiana Jones story, and the voice acting is top tier. I'm enjoying exploring the more open areas, and already have 44 hours and am only maybe 60% through the main story, since I'm doing all the side content.


I was worried that the enemy ai was going to rough, but so far with my play style, it hasn't been jarringly bad. I did up the amount of enemies that will use guns at any given time, which is just a setting, but if you go in guns blazing it can very quickly get difficult and they can be quite aggressive. I have experimented a bit with causing real havoc, and playing with dynamite can be pretty effective with large groups. If you have a few sticks, toss the first one somewhere central, making sure not to be seen, and wait for all of them to gather on the spot, and then light and prime another stick for a few seconds and toss it into the crowd. That's probably the worst ai behavior I've encountered so far.

Overall it's a really fun experience and almost every scenario I've encountered has a surprising number of options for how to approach it. I hope they patch some of the glitches, for instance DLSS frame gen causes a lot of weird artifacts for me, on my 4090 5800X3D system. I'm running maxed setting with full RT and DLSS Quality at 3440 x 1440 ultrawide, and without frame gen I'm getting about 60FPS but is could be smoother.

The amount of basic features gated behind a grind/paywall for a game I just spent $80 on is absolutely disgusting. I can't delete my save and start fresh without paying money, and they enforce this by forcing saves from their servers?! Are you kidding me?! This deserves to fail unless this sort of walled garden garbage is changed. This is such a crazy thing to enforce limits on. The fact they lock to one save for a character I'm fine with, it's a design decision to stop save scumming, at least that's the claim. But to say I can't create a new game is absurd levels of "you don't own this, let us prove it to you". Shame on you folks ruining this industry.

Loving it so far. Yes its slow and a bit clunky, and save limitations are a little much, but It's got a ton of soul, and has me hooked.

3090 and 5800x3D with 32GB ram, runs at 45-55 fps on high at 1440x3440, No FSR. Epic settings seem to only drop it a couple fps. Settings don't seem to do much. I thought I was running it at 50ish with RT on but it wasn't actually working. I had to restart the game and toggle RT a couple times and then suddenly its down in the 30 FPS range, so yeah, some people might actually think RT is on, its probably not. Also tried setting FSR to Quality, and I actually lost about 3-4 FPS standing in the same spot. Going through any of the FSR settings changed nothing, turned it back off and got my 3-4 FPS back. What even is this. Refunding.

UPDATE (4/28/23): So while I don't think they should have released the game the way they did, at least for me they did make some major improvements, and I can say I would recommend it, as long as you have a mid-high tier gaming PC. I finished the game after they "fixed" the terrible mouse stutter issue a few patches back. It wasn't perfect, and the last level at the hospital still had some bad frametime issues. FPS was ok, but it wasn't smooth. It was however much better, and enjoyable and they have released several more patches since, so I want to reward what I think was some solid post launch support. Many problems fixed within a month. Some games don't improve that much in a year. So although they should honestly be ashamed for selling such a broken mess, they did right as far as I can tell, in making improvements very quickly.

Original Negative review: TLDR, Great game, Terrible port by a company (Iron Galaxy) known for bad ports. Go watch Digital Foundry's TLOU PC comparison video they put out today (4/2/2023) if you think the negative reviews aren't justified.

I played TLOU a few years ago on my PS4 Pro. Its a phenomenal game is many ways. Maybe the most engaging immersive story I've ever experienced, and it altered my expectations for storytelling in game. Certainly there are aspects that aren't perfect. While I actually like how characters control, the gun play never quite felt right to me, but I would say that about Naughty Dogs others games too. Aiming always felt clunky and inconsistent, and that's coming from someone that loves the weighty lumbering feeling of games like Dayz, and Red Dead Redemption 2. But the atmosphere, and amazing writing and exceptional voice acting in The Last of Us, for me at least, vastly outweighs what I would consider is few deficiencies.

For years I've hoped Sony and ND would bring the game to PC. I just knew that if I could play with a mouse & keyboard, I would have a much better combat experience, as someone who finds joysticks a poor control input for aiming. I was so excited to see this finally coming to PC, and have been mostly impressed with the last few big Sony games that have been ported over. Unfortunately I didn't take any time to research who was actually working on the port. As someone who owns Batman Arkham Knight, and still experienced some serious bug and crashes last time I tried playing it two years ago, six years after it's launch, I'm worried that certain issues in this release might never be fixed. I am glad to see them releasing hotfixes, but I won't hold my breath for some of the baffling problems that are present in another terrible Iron Galaxy port. Why they don't contract with Nixxes, who generally puts out amazing PC ports, or at least solid ones that get polished to nearly perfect relatively quickly, is beyond me.

Digital Foundry put out a very good comparison video today, and they showcased some serious problems with this port, and anyone saying people "just don't know how to run the game properly, aka wait for shader compile" go watch this video. Some of their takeaways are, Medium environmental textures are like PS2 level quality, no joke, the first release of the game on PS3 had better textures than current PC medium setting. Unfortunately the insane VRAM requirements means that anyone with 8GB or lower (the vast majority of PC gamers) needs to run medium textures or risk either crashes, or the terrible stutters you can get when running out of VRAM. Something else they observed was that the CPU usage is absolutely crazy, and that it seems to be doing a ton of background loading even after you're loaded into a scene. They observed that if they waited, standing idle for about a minute, to 90 seconds after they loaded into certain scenes, performance would go from like 45 fps and huge cpu usage, to maybe 60 fps and moderate cpu usage. This sort of background loading and performance hit is pretty uncommon these days, and simply waiting a couple minutes after each load, seeing that sort of performance increase clearly indicates some pretty big underlying problems, almost like they're streaming in the entire level all at once, and even if your'e just off in some bathroom looking at the corner, its chugging along until they load everything. That's not how modern games are supposed to work. There are also some very bad texture layering or depth problems that mean in some places you just see voids, or spots where the wrong texture is showing through on overlaps. Load times are also really bad, made evident when you skip a cut scene. Loading a save in the same spot on PS5 vs PC running 3600/2070ti had the PS5 at 13 sec, vs the PC at over 1 minute. While the hardware decompression on the PS5 is very impressive, and usually has faster load times than its ports, this huge discrepancy is not present in other PS5 ports, and absolutely is not simply a hardware limitation.

And while the game has some very impressive details, and asset density, the levels are relatively small for todays standards, and when huge open world games like Spider-Man, or Cyberpunk, or The Witcher 3, all having some pretty impressive detail and asset density, are also expansive open worlds that require huge draw distances, and yet require far less performance while still looking good at medium settings.

For transparency, the game isn't crashing for me, though I waited till the second hotfix patch on the 30th to buy it, and I waited the 15 or so minutes it took to compile shaders on my machine at that time.
Specs:
5800X 3D, 3080 10GB, 32GB 3600 CL16 DDR4 Memory, installed on Gen4 NVMe with Read/Write speeds around 7,000/5,100MB/s , running ultrawide 3440x1440 on mostly High settings with DLSS Quality mode which means a internally rendered resolution of 2296x960.

(for comparison, CP2077 at ultra, DLSS 2 Quality and full Ray Tracing, highest setting below psycho, runs at a smooth 60-70fps)

I'm getting between 44-61 FPS, though even when its at a smooth 60, there is some sort of jitter or choppiness in the camera movement that I can't really account for, as my frame times seem ok. This might be more of a mouse control problem, and I saw a rumor this might be something that's fixed soon, fingers crossed. This choppiness, along with some of the worst, inconsistent mouse control I've ever felt, and this is after dropping sensitivity by nearly 50%, severely impacts fighting, as even the slower enemies have some very sporadic twitchy movements, tracking a target just feels bad. But even just moving through the world, which is beautifully built, and lit, just does not feel good due to the lack of smoothness of camera movement. If I didn't have the FPS counter and frame time graph visible I'd assume I was seeing a much lower, 35-40 fps and inconsistent frame times.

If they can fix most of these texture layering problems, make medium textures not look like absolute melted garbage, address the crazy high performance degradation that seems to exist the first couple minutes after loading in, and smooth out camera movement jitter/chop then I'll update this review. I'll be waiting for these improvements to continue my playthrough.

I have yet to be able to play the game on my rift. It simply shows a white screen. If I take the headset off, it shows up in the VR mirror window on my monitor. Have tried running in steamVR and Oculus mode. Makes no difference. It was cheap and I figured it would get fixed. 3 months later same story, even though my system is completey rebuilt. Junk, and I can't even refund it now.

Wow. This blew me away. I had no idea what I was in store for. Really hope to see more