The Last Of Us Part 1 PC Patch 1.1.1 Arrives With More Fixes, Here’s How TLOU Part 2 Solved the Third-Person Bow and Arrow Problem

The Last of Us Part 1 is revered as one of the best remakes of all time, adding next-gen performance and fidelity to an already top-notch title. However, the PC port of the game has been suffering from performance issues since release, and Naughty Dog has been hard at work trying to get the game optimised for the platform. The developers just released patch 1.1.1 for PC, and it brings a lot more fixes to the game.

The Last of Us Part 1 PC patch 1.1.1

The latest patch for the PC port of the title resolves issues faced with visuals, user experience, and fixes crashes and other problems players have been facing in the game. The patch works towards resolving platform and hardware-specific fixes too, bringing changes to the main game, Left Behind Standalone, cccessibility, Steam Deck, and AMD.

In the main game, players will observe fixes to issues encountered in permadeath speedruns, rock and wall textures, animations, UI, photo mode, model viewer, The Outskirts, Tommy’s Dam, The University, Bus Depot and More. Left Behind Standalone sees fixes for game crashing and Mallrats.

Accessibility sees changes fixes to Screen Magnifier zoom and Steam Deck’s directional button issues for behind-the-scenes podcast navigation have been fixed. AMD RX 580 and RX 590 series GPUs were observing checkerboard patterns on screen with motion blur on, this has been fixed. Check out the full patch notes here.

How The Last of Us Part II solved the bow and arrow camera issue

Recently, JellyCar developer Walaber (via Gamespot) recently did an analysis of how the player camera works in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on Twitter. He also spoke about how the camera perspective for bow and arrow shooting is different in TOTK when compared to other games. TOTK takes an overhead approach with the bow and arrow shooting, whereas other third-person titles such as The Last of Us use an over-the-shoulder perspective.

The issue with bow and arrows in third-person titles arises from the placement of the reticule on the screen. As the character holding the bow is positioned to the left of the screen, the reticule appears slightly off to the side when players aim, causing some inaccuracies in aiming.

Developers have to use workarounds in order to avoid this discrepancy with aiming, and the senior game designer for The Last of Us, Derek Mattson, chimed in to explain how they solved this issue.

Mattson explains they approached this issue in two ways for the two instalments: In The Last of Us Part I, the developers treated the arrow as a grenade in order to avoid this discrepancy, but the issue here was that the players now had “near-perfect” information about the arrows projectile. This made the skill level lower, as the only thing the players had to worry about was timing.

They used a different method for The Last of Us Part II. When Ellie shoots an arrow in the game, it actually launches two projectiles. One of these projectiles is invisible and responsible for all the in-game interactions, reacting with the environment based on the player’s aim. This invisible projectile originates from the camera’s position. The second projectile carries all the textures and visuals of Ellie’s arrow, while its trajectory is determined by the collision point where it meets the invisible projectile.

Mattson further explained that this particular issue is less noticeable when dealing with faster projectiles but becomes more evident with slower ones. For readers interested in exploring this topic further, the full thread can be found in the embedded post above, offering insights into how other games, such as Tomb Raider, have addressed similar challenges and more.