The Last of Us is Below Naughty Dog's Standard of Quality and Polish

KaboomShark writer Ryan "Rdawg" T writes - "By now, I would say it's a pretty safe bet to say that most people have gotten their hands on Naughty Dog's latest masterpiece, The Last of Us. I sure know the guys at KaboomShark have! We have become quite accustomed to having late night multiplayer sessions, but that is a story for another time. To get back on topic, The Last of Us is a beautiful game that tells the amazing story of a scarred man and a traumatized girl. However, regardless of how beautiful The Last of Us is (by both standards of environment, story and gameplay), there are still many issues that left me perplexed. When I play a Naughty Dog game, especially one like The Last of Us which focusses on environment and atmosphere, I expect something that is polished to a degree that most development teams can only dream of. I wish I could say that about their most recent success showcased this level of polish, but I just can't. While The Last of Us is a great game, it's just not up to Naughty Dog's standards when it comes to quality and polish."

[Majin-vegeta]

Name one game that is bug free and perfect??Exactly you can't.You can't get rid of every little thing.

[MoXxXi]

Sure, there are no games that are completely bug free, but you would think Naughty Dog would at least try and get rid of a lot of the easy ones, such as disappearing walls and environments. There are just a lot of bugs and glitches for a Naughty Dog game. It didn't ruin the game, but it definitely put a strain on some pretty important parts for me.

[Abash]

If they were so easy to remove dont you think Naughty Dog would remove them in a simple update? The Last of Us is the best looking console game yet, it pushes the PS3 to it's limits, it isnt as simple as you think

[HarryMasonHerpderp]

To be fair you could tell they were pushing the PS3 to its limits and also the campaign is twice as long as an Uncharted game. I imagine that's why it's not as bug free as their earlier games.
I'm guessing they will release a patch in the future to tidy things up a bit.

[admiralvic]

@ Abash

While it might be more complex than we might think, that doesn't mean it is super complex either.

For instance take the sex line phone numbers. They could have avoided that WHOLE SITUATION by simply calling the numbers before including them in the game. Would have took, what? 2 minutes to verify they weren't real numbers, yet they didn't.

[Soldierone]

A lot of that stuff will take ages to perfect. A lot of disappearing things etc are just how games render, and sometimes it comes down to the console itself skipping a beat. I bet a lot of these will disappear if you play the game again, then happen again at a different point. I've had several games do that.

its like saying "dont you think car manufacturer A would find a way to stop brakes from wearing out, dead batteries, and spark plug replacements?"

[darthv72]

damn!! i cant wait to see what their games look like that are "at" or "above" standards.

[KwietStorm_BLM]

There is no such thing as an easy bug to get rid of. And you would have to know it's there, and be able to recreate it before you can fix it anyway. Tired of all these armchair software engineers this generation.

[gamertk421]

How dare you bash the Sony Pony crown jewel! Look it's a great game, but it's not the second coming. There's nothing wrong with a bit of criticism when deserved. You'd think they were talking about someone's kid or something.

[soniqstylz]

I'm on my third playthrough, and have yet to see any of these strange bugs. The only one I've seen is that some textures didn't load properly during the prologue on my NG+, but that was fixed by the recent patch.

[Salooh]

I never saw disappearing walls and environments. You people just like to complain . i only saw like 2 or 3 bugs in two playthroughs ..

[pixelsword]

What's this article really about?

To Paraphrase:

"I just published a flaimbait article and now you MUST click on it to see if I'm right or wrong! Muhaha!"

Which is about 80% of game articles anyways...

[Am_Ryder]

Disappearing walls and environments are 100% down to the individual console's Blu-Ray player, and it's faults. Usually due to aging. A massive majority of players didn't experience anything at all.

I didn't experience a single bug throughout the entire game. No exaggeration. I've probably been playing it for about 40-50 hours. Not a single bug or glitch.

[AsheXII]

Zelda, Mario and Metroid games, for most parts,

[I_LOVE_MYSELF]

All have bugs. Very popular with the speed runners.

[zebramocha]

@ash you know you can glitch a game.

[duducus]

They don't have visual bugs...

[2pacalypsenow]

MGS 4 single player

[Skips]

Metal Gear Solid 4 = 5-7 hours of GAMEPLAY

The Last Of Us = 13-14 hours of GAMEPLAY

[Campy da Camper]

@skips...5-7 hours? I spent waaay more than that. Did you just run through the game on easy?

[2pacalypsenow]

@skips TLOF took me 14 Hours on Normal MGS 4 took me 15

[Skips]

I'm talking gameplay WITHOUT CUT SCENES guys...

In terms of PURE GAMEPLAY on Solid Normal, it took me like 5-7 hours. But when you bumb up the difficulty to say, Big Boss Hard, or Big Boss Extreme. Of course it would take a few hours longer.

Without cinematics though, it's definitely a whole lot shorter than The Last Of Us.

MGS4 has like, almost 10 hours worth of cut scenes while The Last Of Us has 3 hours worth.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

@2pacalypsenow

"TLOF took me 14 Hours on Normal MGS 4 took me 15"

MGS4: 15 - 10 = 5
TLOU: 14 - 3 = 11

[Reverent]

Having took 16 hours to beat MGS4 and 14 to beat TLOU, still, MGS4 didn't even come close to exhausting the PS3's power as much as TLOU.

@Skip, actually TLOU has less than an hours worth of cutscenes. The majority of what people assume are cutscenes, are actually in game occurences. I've even checked the Bonus Gallery in TLOU after beating the game. Surprisingly, there were very few cutscenes and most of them were about a minute long.

[black0o]

Final Fantasy XIII on ps3 .. and that game didnt even needed a single update since it came out

[Zezo]

Tlou is not a bad game in general but it has some pretty lame aspects. Is it a perfect game? Not at all. Does it deserve praise? Absolutely no Fu*&^ing way. It looks like absolute garbage, covered in jaggies, and horrible low res textures.

And the ending, oh boy what a waste.

[isa_scout]

ABOVE
This is what a Troll looks like people. Move Along, Move Along...

[omi25p]

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Muffins1223]

No but it shouldent be a glitchy mess like fallout or skyrim on ps3

[Mr_Nuts]

Well I've played the game and finished it and never came across one bug....must of been lucky

Besides does it matter....hell in 2011 we gave Bethesda Studio of the Year and Game of the Year to Skyrim. The most bug filled game of the entire year

[MoXxXi]

Of course, with Skyrim the glitches were silly and almost improved gameplay. With a game like TLoU where the environment is set so well, it's so easy to lose the tension when Ellie's sprite floats in the air with enlongated limbs...Maybe I just like to get mad at small things because I am so infuriated that TLoU was better than Bioshock Infinite :}

[Baka-akaB]

Come on now you're scrapping the barrel . Skyrim's bugs werent entertaining nor game improving . On one platform the game became even unplayable at times .

Both hardly have the same level and amount of bugs , each game's ambitions and scope aside . Plenty people manage to play Last of us mostly bug free . The most we've heard about issues with the game was usually about the saves .

I so far only got stuck once on some barrel whose contact made noise and alerted clickers

[Lovable]

Hey that would have been hilarious bugs!

[Hydralysk]

I played Skyrim on PS3, and a glitch, which hasn't even been fully resolved made it so that for the first few months the game had a framerate so bad that it made the game practically into a slideshow.

Skyrim does NOT get a pass, especially since they tried to cover it up by not giving out PS3 review copies.

[isa_scout]

Did you play Skyrim on the PS3??? Because after 120 hours or so the game became unplayable for me due to the lag and stuttering. Nothing about that made me feel like it was small,silly, or improving the gameplay. I haven't even experienced a small glitch in TLOU and I've beaten it three times already.

[CaptainYesterday]

I didn't experience any bugs during my playthrough my game froze once but that was because I was playing for way too long it's hard to stop playing once you start!

[Unicron]

I hit a ridiculous amount of occlusion bugs, saw a ton of seams in the geo, but the sheer size of the game's world made me pretty forgiving of it. I only hit one missing environment bug and no animation issues. I'm guessing they updated their occlusion system from previous titles and weren't able to work all the kinks out before ship.

[Williamson]

I too never came across a glitch/bug. Seems like people will do what ever to bring this game down, keep trying since this is one hell of a game.

[fattyuk]

ON YOUR BIKE

[PersonMan]

I noticed some textures taking forever to load, but that's the only problem I ran into. Some textures in Uncharted 3 took long to load as well... I guess it's the engine. I even tried playing The Last of Us from an SSD drive and the textures took an equally long time to load, so I know it has nothing to do with reading from the blu-ray drive and more to do with the engine not having the resources available to load the texture at that point in the game. The rest of the game played okay though.

My other other complaint is, I wish I could jump on my own and I wish the camera was a little further back so I could see the entire character. I'm not a big fan of waist-up camera views.... it makes it look funny when walking.

[Mr-SellJack]

Jumping?!as in freely?that would totally kill the tension and survival feel of the game also camera is zoomed so it wouldn't feel like uncharted and your typical. tps.jumping for nothing and like a retard like uncharted is disabled.jumpimg is for efficient use in the game

[PersonMan]

I like the freedom to jump in games. It's just the way I am. However, it's not like the game was ruined because I couldn't jump. It was still an excellent game.

[Mr-SellJack]

Turd article is shite

[Maddens Raiders]

This is really dumb.

[xtremexx]

fairly sure they are anomalies. bugs happen.

[MestreRothN4G]

Stupid hit fishing = WTF and NO.
And, obviously, no hit.

[TuxedoMoon]

I want to beat the game and dont want any spoilers, but ill assume that the bugs ruined the game for him? If the glitches were as bad as this writer says, then the game might not have been getting near perfect scores. I don't think Skyrim, with it's game of the year award, got near perfect scores and some reviewers did take the game breaking glitches into consideration.

Some glitches and bugs are tolerable. Unless it breaks the game, then it shouldn't be much of an issue.

[Roper316]

( minor spoiler )I agree to an extent because very early on when I was fleeing with Sara & Tommy and we were in Tommy's car, Tommy ended up outside in front of the car facing back at me talking to me while he was still supposed to be driving & the car was still moving down the road.

I kind of think that this game was supposed to release in October/November but was bumped up to June because of the PS4 releasing around that time. So some things didn't get as polished as they could but this is still just an incredible game / experience that everyone should get the pleasure of playing.

[Pintheshadows]

I came across them only when showing it to my friends. The first playthrough had a few issues when I threw molotovs but not much more. However this time during the opening sequence the game flipped out as they hit the traffic jam and Joel, still sitting floated through the roof of the car and the helicopter overhead also floated upwards.

[jjb1981]

A Masterpiece!

[KittyEmperor]

Only bug i've ever encountered in this game is the autosave one and that has been fixed.

[silkrevolver]

I came across one bug, and it involved a stray dog getting stuck on a roof.

I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with the authors on this one.

[medman]

People really love to complain. One of the best, if not the best, developer on the planet has consistently graced the gaming public with phenomenal games and we sit here and moan about what amounts to rather insignificant little bugs? Really? I loved the game. That story is fantastic, the world they created is brutal, harsh, and wonderful. I can tolerate an occasional glitch considering everything the game is. Nothing in this life is perfect. Why would you expect any game to be?

[Bowzabub]

I attribute the majority of flaws in The Last of Us to the hardware.

[strickers]

Uncharted was buggy. UC2 had some massive bugs. I encountered one where I dropped through the environment . Why? Because they push so hard and are actually quite small teams . UC2 shat on all other console games for ages , technically .
A few bugs for that level of visuals and presentation are acceptable .
Especially with so many other games full of glitches , tearing and framerate issues , while achieving far less

[testsubject]

Even though I only got to play this game once on my friends PS3,( I don't have a PS3),I have experienced glitches in The Last of Us and it still is one of the best games I have ever played,same goes for Bioshock Infinite :)

[jakmckratos]

below standard of quality and polish??? It oozes quality you BITCH.

[Son_Lee]

The beauty of always trying to be perfect is you constantly improve your quality of work. Naughty Dog knows this.

[evilhasitsway]

ok I played and beat the game I didn't see any major problems with the game so whatever you say man. don't talk crap unless you have played it and beat it. and that goes for any game.

[Elda]

Bought it a month ago & still haven't played it yet.