The Final of Us Half I arrived on PC this March as an embarrassing, damaged PC port of a recreation, even on high-end machines. Once I tried it on my Steam Deck handheld, the sport was totally unplayable — regardless of co-creator Neil Druckmann’s assurances that the sport would “grace” the Steam Deck.

However after 11 patches, I can lastly affirm The Final of Us is totally playable on Valve’s moveable PC.

As of final evening I’ve accomplished all 14 hours of the sport on my Deck alone, and I haven’t seen a single crash or game-breaking glitch. I not often noticed the body price drop beneath a locked 30 frames per second on default settings, and I’ve comfortably pressed the facility button at any time to droop and resume, day after day, with out challenge.

You now not want to attend an hour for shaders to construct. The controls are the place they must be. There’s even a bit of “shake your Steam Deck” icon within the recreation when it’s time to shake your flashlight batteries.

The sport was virtually nearly as good as I remembered, too, aside from one factor:

It seems worse on Steam Deck than on my unique, 16-year-old launch version PlayStation 3.

How is a 10-year-old recreation working higher on 16-year-old {hardware} than its supposed remaster on a contemporary AMD chip?

It’s difficult, however listed here are two components of the reply:

1. The Final of Us was a technological marvel again in 2013, as you’ll be able to see on this Digital Foundry characteristic. Naughty Canine pulled out all of the stops focusing on a single mounted {hardware} platform.
2. On Steam Deck, The Final of Us Half I is working at absolute potato ranges of element.

To make its troubled PC port playable in any respect, Sony cranked the settings all the way down to the naked minimal. I’m not simply speaking about fancy options like display screen house reflections and dynamic lighting high quality, both. I imply draw distance, animation high quality, decision, and — particularly — textures.

The textures are particularly atrocious once you examine to the PS3. There are complete ranges the place each floor seems like a muddy mess.

Talking of mud: would you imagine me if I advised you this blurry patch at Joel’s ft is meant to be a pond? And what’s occurring with that tree department?

I believe it’s damaged as a result of that tree resides its worst life, so to talk. On a higher-end PC, I believe I’d be capable to crank up settings that make the whole tree department seem as one contiguous, complicated object skinned in wealthy bark. As a substitute, I get a low-poly stick, flickering out and in of existence, as if torn between ethereal realms.

It doesn’t all look this dangerous! However when it’s, there’s not rather a lot you’ll be able to meaningfully do to repair it on the Deck. The settings are already about as little as they will go. I’m keen to guess a few of them are even decrease than the builders meant — I had already set each setting to minimal in March, and it merely wasn’t sufficient. (Lots of the texture high quality variables don’t also have a in-game setting anymore: they merely show a lock.)

The sport’s really working at a notably decrease decision than it does on PS3, too — 856 x 536, upscaled by AMD’s FidelityFX Tremendous Decision to 1280 x 800. The PS3 ran TLoU at a local 1280 x 720, Digital Foundry revealed again in 2013.

Regardless of all this, I loved my run by means of the sport! The graphics aren’t all the time as dangerous because the examples, and graphics don’t trump enjoyable. The PC you’ve got is best than the PlayStation you don’t, and I can forgive rather a lot on a 7-inch display screen I can tackle the go.

Additionally, the remake does enhance on the unique recreation in a couple of methods, like bettering the AI pathfinding (fewer NPCs standing round or doing dumb issues), including extra foliage, and making the character fashions extra detailed — examine my video for examples. There’s additionally an unimaginable variety of New Recreation+ choices, together with 8-bit and watercolor graphics filters, extremely adjustable issue (together with weapons and sources) and non-obligatory permadeath if you wish to drive your self right into a extra nailbiting playstyle.

I additionally discovered a easy trick to enhance battery life and stabilize body price on the Steam Deck that you could be need to strive: set the in-game body limiter to 40fps as an alternative of 30fps, then activate the Steam Deck’s personal body limiter to 30 in Fast Entry > Efficiency > Framerate Restrict.

See, Naughty Canine’s personal body limiter at the moment struggles to do it correctly, with fixed body time spikes and unusually excessive energy draw. However with a easy change to Valve’s limiter, I went from draining the battery at 27W all the way down to 22W in the exact same scene. I’m seeing ranges of as little as 17W throughout mild exploration as much as 29W in intense fight, and it seems like I can get a pair hours of Steam Deck battery life on common given the sport’s pacing.

You may additionally need to be certain the Deck has downloads throughout gameplay turned off, as downloading even a small patch for one more recreation can impact efficiency. And also you would possibly need to mess around with the varied audio choices, as I acquired some sound glitches within the spatial audio mode.

As of this writing, 41 p.c of Steam evaluations of The Final of Us Half I are nonetheless adverse. Some persons are nonetheless reporting main crashes on desktop PCs. However 86 p.c of current evaluations — from the final 30 days — at the moment are optimistic as an alternative. I ponder if this recreation nonetheless has an opportunity of cracking 1,000,000 copies ultimately. As of April twenty third, Sony had managed to promote 368,000 of them.