Say what? First, the game takes about 10 minutes to load the main menu (no exaggeration). Aggravating, but not ruinous. Finally, I got three minutes into the prologue before encountering the first game-breaking bug. As soon as I guided Joel out of the wrecked car and through a chain link gate, the game's geometry stopped loading and Joel was stuck falling interminably into oblivion. Great! I rebooted my PS3 and tried again. Same result. I tried a third time. Same result. Okay, let's clean the disc. Scratchless and spotless. Try again. The floor actually loaded this time and I made it through a door with a horde of infected just behind me.
It is at this point I believe a cutscene tried to play, but it's hard to say for sure. Three or four infected humans were right behind Joel, but now they are cardboard-cutout caricatures with no volume and no animation. They are literally two-dimensional sprites shuffling around on the screen, frozen in some state of half-animation. Most of the sound engine cuts out and all I hear are soft footsteps chasing Joel. The screen goes black for nearly five whole minutes, then suddenly the game returns to life. The aforementioned door appears to have lead to the other side of an exterior wall rather than into any kind of building. The game crashes after taking a few steps on the other side of the door. The pause menu says "Autosave still in progress." It never seems to finish, so I don't get any checkpoints and have to start the prologue over every time.
Fortunately I'm not the first person to experience any of these issues:
- Audio drops out
- Geometry fails to load
- Textures fail to resolve (surfaces appear "muddy")
- Absurd load times
- Cannot save game
- Animations fail to load, leaving two-dimensional sprites floating on the screen
- Cannot quit game without crashing the PS3, forcing me to physically unplug the power cable
Unfortunately no one on the Internets offers any resolution to these issues. Naughty Dog claimed to have fixed the "Autosave" bug a few weeks after the game was released - sometime in June or so - which was caused by "an issue with their servers", but people seem to have outright stopped talking about the game altogether as of mid-July. Wait - why is my game saving to Naughty Dog's servers? Does that mean I cannot play offline? What happens when Naughty Dog decides to stop running said servers? Apparently they are somehow vital to the game. What happens if I try to play offline?
This is the path of logic I took in troubleshooting the game. After three hours of troubleshooting, it dawned on me to unplug the ethernet cable to my PS3, knocking it off the Internet. Outrageously, The Last of Us works flawlessly offline. Clearly, when an Internet connection is present, it attempts to phone home to Naughty Dog for reasons unknown (presumably saving to their cloud or some nonsense). For whatever reason, this wasn't working and it caused my PS3 to thrash horribly: it was so overwhelmed it couldn't even run the game's geometry, textures, animation, or sound.
It's difficult to express my frustration with this situation, so I'll just leave it at this. For shame, Naughty Dog. I won't be buying another of your titles. Ever.
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