the naughty dog announced its commitment to designing future games around PlayStation and PC. The studio has focused solely on console in the past, which has made porting its titles to PC a complex process. Hopefully this will avoid some of the issues we saw with the recent release of The Last of Us Part 1 on Steam.

Naughty Dog will handle its own PC ports

As explained in the official blog post celebrating the PC release of The Last of Us Part 1, Naughty Dog’s decision to fully support and create PC ports is a significant one. In the article, Vice President Christian Gyrling described the difficulties of adapting the input from a DualSense controller to a keyboard and mouse:

For example, The Last of Us Part I on PlayStation 5 uses “stick walking”, in which players walk through space using the DualSense controller’s joystick. As we all know, walking too fast in The Last of Us could alert infected people, which is something you’ll want to avoid if you’re trying to stay stealthy. But when using the joystick, players’ emotions can sometimes take over, slowing down the speed at which they walk.

This feature is both tactile and emotional, adding to the suspense of any encounter. For the PC version, we had to accommodate many gamers’ preference for using a keyboard and mouse as a viable control method. However, they do not necessarily behave the same as a controller. Therefore, the design team explored and adapted this traversal approach while ensuring a world-class gaming experience with mouse and keyboard. We want PC gamers to experience the same level of tactile, suspenseful gameplay that console gamers already enjoy.

It’s clear that Sony sees the PC as a valuable secondary platform, and Naughty Dog’s confirmation that it will be developing its PC versions in-house, at least partially, is a bold commitment. Of course, that’s unlikely to mean we’ll see PC versions on day one, but it could significantly reduce the time it takes for Sony’s first-party games to hit Steam.

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