It's official, Valve put The Last of Us Part 1 through Deck Verified and gave it an Unsupported status on Steam Deck. Not really a good look for either Valve or Naughty Dog.
Before release, Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann said pretty clearly on Twitter that "Ellie and Joel will grace the Steam Deck… don’t worry!". However, Druckmann didn't exactly say when, so I suppose the statement isn't exactly false just yet? Worse though, is that Valve began using it in their Steam Deck clips on the official Steam Deck website and it's even still showing it today:
Pretty misleading isn't it? While it only shows briefly, it's a very well known scene in the game (and the TV show…), that plus Druckmann's statement together aren't great, no doubt some people pre-ordered it based on the hype surrounding it. Especially a nuisance given how specifically on Steam Deck, half the refund window was taken up by it doing the shaders.
Personally, I've been rather disappointed with the situation. It's not just the Steam Deck performance though, the game as a whole had a really rough launch on PC in a clear case of another game just being released too early. There's been quite a few bigger games launching in a state over the last year but at least they weren't being hyped up for the Steam Deck in the way this was. Hopefully both Valve and Naughty Dog will reflect on this.
Naughty Dog have said on Twitter yesterday, April 3rd:
A reminder that we will have a new hotfix live for The Last of Us Part I on PC tomorrow, and a patch on Friday.
We will share patch notes when the hotfix is live, and let you know some of what to expect in Friday's patch ahead of its launch.
And the follow-up:
And while we know many of you would like to play The Last of Us Part I on Steam Deck, we are prioritizing fixes and patches before submitting it for verification.
We will keep you updated of its Steam Deck status as we continue to improve the PC version.
Kinda amusing their note about verification but Valve ran it through anyway…
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Kinda amusing their note about verification but Valve ran it through anyway
Lol. But that's on Valve for doing it, but, it's probably smart of Valve to take it out of the devs hands. Now Valve has a shield against complaints "Look it's unsupported, go harass the dev if you want it to work!!"
I will say, you are right in that Valve was kinda stupid too. If your gonna use something in your promo material, you should probably make sure it works in the first place.
Hopefully they work together to make it not sink on the Deck.
StoneColdSpider Apr 4, 2023
Kinda amusing their note about verification but Valve ran it through anyway…It's definitely the case that this game in its current state is not "Great On Deck." The store page should reflect that. Even if game developers pinky swear that it's going to get better at some point in the future.
Even on launch day, I was able to enjoy it after waiting 30 minutes for the shaders to build and turning down the settings a bit. I have it locked on 30 FPS and the framerate never drops below that. Even the crackling audio issue I experienced on launch is now gone for me.
StalePopcorn Apr 4, 2023
Why would anyone believe anything Druckmann says? The guy already has a reputation of being a liar and an asshole, lol.
I mean I know the current state of the game is probably not great but let's not go too far. Steam has a good return policy if people are unhappy with their purchase and the game in question is not marked as "Unsupported". They f-up, they know it and now it's up to ND to fix it. Let's not turn this place into a hate train. It's one of the few places I read can the comments without getting hit in the face by the negativity.
Shader compilation in the menu went really fast for me, I don't know if it's my 5800X3D or valves ACO just being impressively fast. But it took ~10 minutes. Nothing like the 2 hours some people were complaining about.
I'm running a Vega 56 8GB and have been experimenting with different settings, trying to find a smooth 60fps.. I was getting as low as 25fps with Medium/High @ native 1080p. I then used FSR2 upscaling from 720p and I was getting 30-45fps. It just felt horrible to me at these framerates. I was then verifying I had Vsync disabled and I noticed the FPS cap slider, so I set that to 60fps and weirdly my frame rate jumped to 60fps and was really smooth. I need to go back and verify that is still the case because I was quite tired by this point.
slaapliedje Apr 4, 2023
We are forgetting back when they were doing marketing for the Steam Machine how they had images of Witcher 3, and this was before Proton could run it by quite a few years. This isn't the first time Valve did an 'oops' as far as marketing goes.Kinda amusing their note about verification but Valve ran it through anyway
Lol. But that's on Valve for doing it, but, it's probably smart of Valve to take it out of the devs hands. Now Valve has a shield against complaints "Look it's unsupported, go harass the dev if you want it to work!!"
I will say, you are right in that Valve was kinda stupid too. If your gonna use something in your promo material, you should probably make sure it works in the first place.
Hopefully they work together to make it not sink on the Deck.
This isn't the first time Valve did an 'oops' as far as marketing goes.It seems that they have too much faith in their partners' promises. I doubt that they would've used both games in advertisements on a whim.
Let's not turn this place into a hate train. It's one of the few places I read can the comments without getting hit in the face by the negativity.
Tbh, as the AVGN once said: "If you're looking at shit, are you going to talk about butterflies or something? No, I'm looking at shit, I'm talking shit.".
It is likely that the promotional video was created by some graphics artist from various footage, and doubtful it even came directly from a Steam Deck. I mean, why capture from the Steam Deck in order to provide exact visuals when you can just take it from a PC. It's nice when you can do it but to save time I'm sure they skip that step.
Honestly the whole port needs fixes overall before it can be fixed for the Deck.
I think they need to institute QA standards that their subsidiaries and partners must pass before they release anything under their brand.
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