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…
While reasonably playable (pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, i7 8700K, 32GB RAM), there's some odd stuff going on.
For one, the game only sees 8GB of the card's 24GB.
There's intermittent audio crackle and as reported by many other users, initial shader compilation after launching the game takes ages. Probably 30 mins on my system.
I also had to knock it down from ultra at 2560x1440 to high, as there were regular, drastic frame dips.
There's blurry textures all over the place that take ages to pop in to high res, making the game look like some of those 15-year old Unreal Engine games.
I mean, I know my CPU and motherboard are a little long in the tooth now, and probably bottle-necking the card, but I still expected a little better than this.
On the bright side, no crashes so far.
Quoting: MaathI don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.
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.
Valve probably tested it. But i think theyr returned list of problems and Naughty Dog promised they fix it before release...
Quoting: MaathI don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.
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.
In that case I would blame Valve. As Liam pointed out, the picture of it is running on a Steam Deck. So yeah, either it's fake, like you mentioned, which is a problem with Valve not being truthful to it's consumers or it is a shot from a Deck, which is a problem as Valve would known it didn't work much earlier but still encouraged sales.
Simulating the screen image for a PR campaign on the Deck is one thing, but when you do it you're implying the game is going to work on on the Deck... That's the problem.
Either way, I'm glad, Valve marked it unsupported, but it's still pretty sketchy they did it after initial release sales. As pointed out earlier in the comments, this isn't the first time Valve has done this with a hyped up game.
Last edited by denyasis on 5 April 2023 at 1:36 am UTC
Quoting: ArdjeIt's good that it's now marked unsupported, but it should mark it's unsupported on PC in general, as I get the idea from those that play on windows that it just plain sucks. And it sucks so hard that Naughty Dog apologized for the current state it is in.
I did a full play through on Linux and while there were some minor bugs and crashes, the only really bad thing is the super long shader compile, but otherwise I really enjoyed it, sure there were some fumbles and the Steam Deck side of things how valve handled it are somewhat inexcusable, the game in general I think is fine, and people really do need to adjust their expectations on the settings, even lowering them down a bit to get bit better performance the game looks really good.
Quoting: denyasisQuoting: MaathI don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.
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.
In that case I would blame Valve. As Liam pointed out, the picture of it is running on a Steam Deck. So yeah, either it's fake, like you mentioned, which is a problem with Valve not being truthful to it's consumers or it is a shot from a Deck, which is a problem as Valve would known it didn't work much earlier but still encouraged sales.
Simulating the screen image for a PR campaign on the Deck is one thing, but when you do it you're implying the game is going to work on on the Deck... That's the problem.
Either way, I'm glad, Valve marked it unsupported, but it's still pretty sketchy they did it after initial release sales. As pointed out earlier in the comments, this isn't the first time Valve has done this with a hyped up game.
Yeah makes you wonder how Valves Steam Deck verification process is setup. Can a big publisher just pinky swear everything is golden thus skipping all the testing?
Quoting: Whitewolfe80Really despise the whole fuck it we will patch it to playable at some point. Just because they can attitude can't blame game Devs for that. That smacks of publisher saying I have sales targets to meet push it out the door and patch it. Some advantages of the pre wide spread broadband days they had to have it be playable out the door. Well maybe except Troika who went bust when vampire bloodlines came out literally two days after the game was on store selves bought it and played it's emense jank long before the fan patches that make it work were around.
Yeah, for those old enough to remember (Pepperidge farm remembers); developers / publishers used to actually deliver games that mostly worked when they were played. There wasn't an easy way to get patches out to players, so they had to make damn sure things worked right. Being able to download patches off the internet kind of ruined a lot of that.
Most impressive thing I still remember, is for some random reason I actually registered my copy of Ultima IX. They sent me a new CD with the patched version plus some extra stuff!
Quoting: BrokattQuoting: denyasisQuoting: MaathI don't blame Valve. I bet they took it on Naughty Dog's word that it was working.
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.
In that case I would blame Valve. As Liam pointed out, the picture of it is running on a Steam Deck. So yeah, either it's fake, like you mentioned, which is a problem with Valve not being truthful to it's consumers or it is a shot from a Deck, which is a problem as Valve would known it didn't work much earlier but still encouraged sales.
Simulating the screen image for a PR campaign on the Deck is one thing, but when you do it you're implying the game is going to work on on the Deck... That's the problem.
Either way, I'm glad, Valve marked it unsupported, but it's still pretty sketchy they did it after initial release sales. As pointed out earlier in the comments, this isn't the first time Valve has done this with a hyped up game.
Yeah makes you wonder how Valves Steam Deck verification process is setup. Can a big publisher just pinky swear everything is golden thus skipping all the testing?
There's an earlier article about it, but basically, there's no requirement that a dev or publisher put it through the process although Valve might do it on their own. From the article above, the publisher/dev hadn't submitted it yet.
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