While the entire world has been talking about The Last of Us Part 2 for several months, Naughty Dog has not forgotten the original classic that made the best selling sequel possible.
A recent update for the PlayStation 4 remastered version of this game has chopped loading times down by an incredible amount. Whereas once, starting a new game on The Last of Us took over a minute and a half, with this new update the game will load up in just under 14 seconds.
Anyone who has played The Last of Us should remember the wait that we all had to sit through in order to start a new game. It felt like that first screen, in which it’s all black with whisps of spores flying about, lasted forever. In actuality it was always somewhere between a minute and a half and two minutes.
Load times have become something of a target for next generation systems, as both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X and Series S seek to make load times practically nonexistent. This patch update comes just a few weeks before the release of the PlayStation 5. When the console launches, 99% of the PS4 library will be playable thanks to backwards compatibility.
When you play The Last of Us Remastered on the PlayStation 5, it’s likely that you’ll see load times even shorter than the current 14 seconds, which seems wild for a game that once took a full two minutes to boot up.
We’ve seen a few of Sony’s games undergo patches in recent weeks, with the most recent being Final Fantasy VII Remake. That game actually received its first ever patch this week, a full six months after its initial release.
Many believe that these new patches are Sony’s way of getting their games ready for the PlayStation 5. The new console will be releasing in the United States on November 12, so it seems plausible that this could be the case.
The Last of Us is one of the most successful and popular Sony exclusives in history. The game made such a lasting impact that HBO is going to be adapting it into a television series. While no casting announcements have been made for the show, we do know that series director Neil Druckmann will be serving as a showrunner alongside Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin.
The Last of Us first debuted on the PlayStation 3 in 2013 and was then remastered and re-released for the PlayStation 4. The Last of Us Part 2 is currently available on the PlayStation 4 as well.
