The Last of Us Part II is coming to Steam on April 3, which a few years ago would have seemed like an impossibility. Sony games, especially Naughty Dog games, live on Sony systems. Thankfully, today, Sony is much more open to its games living on other platforms.

Ahead of the game’s PC port, we spoke with The Last of Us Part II Remaster’s game director and Naughty Dog’s head of tech, Matthew Gallant and Travis McIntosh respectively, about the porting process, which was handled in partnership with Nixxes. Nixxes studio head and PC project director Jurjen Katsman and Coen Frauenfelder, respectively, were also on hand as part of the discussion. We talked about mod culture, the technical process of porting the game, UI arguments, Steam Deck, and why it’s difficult to port a game from PlayStation to PC even though the game was technically built on a PC to begin with.

Game Informer: Regarding PC ports in general – and I acknowledge this is a dumb question – but, presumably, The Last of Us Part II was developed on a PC. So why is it so difficult to bring a game to PC when it was built on a PC to begin with?

Frauenfelder: [Laughs] That’s a very good question.

McIntosh: Okay. So let me talk about how development happens at Naughty Dog. So, everybody has a PC at their desk, but they also have a PS4, PS5 dev kit, depending on which game we’re talking about, also at their desk, and the dev kits are hooked up to a TV.

So when we compile the code, when we run the code, it does not run on a PC. It runs on the PlayStation next to us, and we debug it on that and the actual hardware that all of our code here at Naughty Dog executes on is always a PlayStation console. So we don’t have any code that would run on a PC, for the entirety of the development of Last of Us Part II.

When we decided to move it to PC, it required a full port. The way we write the code is very close to the hardware. It’s very specific to PlayStation hardware. So the code will work on this one graphics card and this one CPU. It relies on the bus speed between the two being a certain amount and the amount of memory being fixed.

All of those things are not true when we go to PC. So that’s why we needed help from multiple partners. But the biggest one, the latest one, is Nixxes, who has done a ton of work to get this game out the door. And they have the expertise of, “How do I get a game to run on multiple sizes of memory, different CPUs on different GPUs. How do I get this to work? And just this huge complexity of 500,000 different potential configurations?”

Katsman: Part of that, I can add to that – one is hardware differences, but also it’s really a different audience. PC gamers tend to be a lot more about using different input devices with the configurability they would like and [the] difference in their display setups. They actually are looking for different experiences. I think PC gamers often gravitate to PC because it offers so much more configurability, so if you tried to give them a one-size-fits-all solution on their PC, that’s not what they want. They want something much more versatile. So, then seeing how can we transform this from a much more fixed system – it worked on 16:9 on the PlayStation on the TV with the DualSense – to something much more versatile. It’s all part of the challenge. Identifying all those things and making sure it all plays out and combines in the right way. All of them individually are so tricky, but the breadth of it is what really makes it challenging.

What is the basic process of doing a port like this? Is it primarily a lot of testing? Are you downloading assets and looking at them and touching every element of the game?

Frauenfelder: First thing to start, we look at the game. We look at the engine. For us, the whole engine was completely new. We haven’t worked together with Naughty Dog until now, of course. At that moment we actually look into, “Okay, how are the assets built? What can we do? How much do we need to reduce quality or improve quality? We’re looking at, for instance, 4K having high resolution. Running things on the lower resolutions. Do we give people ACR support, widescreen support? Which definitely makes it that we need to do all kinds of content tweaks and fixes because it’s outside of the 16:9 aspect ratio. But also using extra tools like NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD R 3 to make the upscalers to make sure that those run faster on specific PCs – So yeah, it’s really a lot of work.

Katsman: I think it’s fair to add that the engine doesn’t build on PC. Sometimes people say a PlayStation is just like a PC. Well, the hardware, in a way, is, but the operating system and the APIs, the programming the code talks to is completely different. So, in a way you don’t need to touch all the assets, but you do need to touch every part of the code that talks to something that’s platform-specific. And that’s an awful lot that needs to be rewritten, then tested against all the assets that already exist and all the game flows and some things will break.

Unfortunately, we don’t just have to test. Well, it keeps us busy, but it’s not just about testing. When you start, you can’t even compile it, right? Nothing works. In that sense, you build it from scratch. But of course, as you do that, you make it work and suddenly all the levels are there because all the levels feed into the same code. But maybe all the levels don’t have textures, so you add an extra layer on top of that. Stage by stage, this whole game comes back together – just in a very different way than Naughty Dog built it. They would build it – not literally – but level by level, you make piece[s] of content. We make all the pieces of code that we think it will take, and then from [the] bottom up it all sort of comes back into existence on a different platform.

What were some of the unexpected difficulties of porting this game? What is something that is more challenging than the average player might expect in bringing a PlayStation game to PC?

McIntosh: Something I think I’ll call out because of what we did on The Last of Us Part I on PC that is much improved. On PlayStation, all your shaders are compiled ahead of time. You just load them up and they work. On PC, you have to compile shaders for each machine as you go. It’s called PSO loading. On the first game we did, we tried to do all that in the main menu. People had to wait a long time. On this game, Nixxes has done a really cool new system that allows it to compile those shaders on the fly and seamlessly play the game without having to wait very long for shaders to build up.

It’s a problem we never had at all on the PlayStation. It’s not even something that we had in our minds. It was a huge engineering effort on the PC version.

Katsman: Another one to add in is memory. On the console, [it’s] one pool of memory. On PC that is much more separated, and transfers between those are quite slow. And so you really need to think about some parts of the code and how those approach memory management, sometimes quite differently. And the more an engine has been tailor-made to fit to those appendages of the PlayStation, the more you really have to untangle that and do things differently.

I think of Naughty Dog games, Last of Us in particular, as very directed, specific experiences. What do you think of mod culture and players taking the game and tweaking it to how they want it to be, whether that’s goofy, silly stuff or, just changing the way the controls work?

Gallant: Let me try to unpack that a little bit. In a lot of ways, we have a lot built into our games, even on the PlayStation, where we meet players where they are. So we have really granular difficulty selection from the range of easy to hard. We not only have a range of difficulty options, but we let you choose differently between how much damage you deal versus how aggressive the enemies are, how effective your allies are, how many supplies you get. We’re already telling players to dial in this experience. If there’s one part of this that you’re bumping against – your hands are ultimately on the controller. You’re playing this game. We want you to have an experience. We want to get things out of the way that are preventing you from coming along with this experience, [and] feeling this journey with Ellie and Abby. This also extends to the stuff that we do with accessibility.

And this is something that, I think we really had to process a little bit internally to say, “Are we okay rendering this whole game in blue, yellow, and red?” which is what our high contrast mode is. “Are people going to be able to watch our emotional cinematics in that mode with everything in this flat color?” And where we ultimately landed was, “Yeah, because this will remove barriers for some players and we’ll make the experience more comfortable for players.”

Philosophically, I feel like we’re already a lot of the way there. Now, this is certainly opening up the game in a way that wasn’t previously possible. It will be an interesting journey to see what players do with the game now that it’s kind of on this very, open-ended ecosystem and we have a lot less control. But I feel like, in general, where we’re at is wanting to meet players where they are. We’re interested to see what players modify in the game. And, I think, [Travis McIntosh], you said this in an earlier interview – sometimes that’s a clue to us to say, “Oh, we should have thought of that. Oh, that’s an interesting option,” that sort of thing.

But that’s maybe the kind of the balance between, like, “Yes, we’re very, concerned about creating a player experience.” You coming along with a story. And we really want to tell you that story in the best way possible. But we’re okay if telling that story in the best way possible means you’re tweaking a bunch of things to make it the right experience for you. I think that’s where we come at it from the game perspective. We want you to have a good, comfortable time playing this game. And if you need certain adjustments to make that happen, we support you.

But what about when somebody swaps their Ellie character model for like… Shrek? Do you bristle at that a little bit? Or is that fun?

Gallant: I think ultimately for a lot of this stuff, in the world we live in now, that stuff was possible with post-editing already. People are already taking these games and making it their own thing and editing in their own moments, or making their own supercuts.  I think part of what’s interesting with games as a medium is that we actually don’t have total complete authorship in the way that someone writing a book or directing a movie – there’s kind of like a gradient of authorship within the medium.

Games are pretty extreme, where the player [brings] a lot of themselves to the experience and how they play and the experience they have where they choose to go, completes the story that’s told through the medium of video games. I’m maybe stretching the metaphor a little bit here, but that’s kind of where my head goes to people taking any of our games and appreciating it or engaging with it in some way that maybe to us is strange, or to us is, maybe we wouldn’t want to do that. But we’re so thrilled that players love these games and want to engage with them in whatever way that expresses themselves in terms of funny edits or whatever is going to open up this game on PC. We’re just thrilled the players love these games or want to engage with them at the end of the day.

Did the PC port afford an opportunity for any final tiny little subtle changes?

McIntosh: Not in the way I think you’re asking. There’s a great quote: “Art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.” In that way, we have already abandoned The Last of Us Part II in the sense that we have put it out there. We are not coming back to try and revisit that sort of thing, but we are adding new things.

[Matthew Gallant] could talk more detail with the No Return mode. We have all sorts of great behind-the-scenes content, The Lost Levels. [There are] lots of new things we’re putting in there, not to change what we’ve delivered, but to add more, for people to experience.

Gallant: I can connect to one thing that is actually related to the new No Return content. And this might be a little bit of a long answer, so please cut me off if this goes too long. We added the new characters, Bill and Marlene. The way it works in the No Return mode is each character has this starting loadout that affects what you’re going to do in the run and obviously, while you’re playing the game, you’re finding new stuff, but you always start from a certain baseline of strengths and weaknesses.

Marlene’s unique trait, and she has a couple of things that she does uniquely, but one is that she has is to complete the gambit on every map. Every time she’s offered a gambit, which are these dynamic challenges like “get a headshot” or “get a kill with a bomb” or something like that – if Marlene doesn’t complete a gambit, she loses out on her encounter reward for the map. That was us tying in thematically to the idea that she’s this risk taker, she takes these really big risks with the Fireflies. Like, she bets the whole thing on taking this girl across the country and developing a cure – spoiler to whatever degree you’re comfortable with – but, as we were developing that system, we were finding in our internal playtests that some gambits weren’t fair, by which I mean some gambits they would trigger and the player would say, “I can’t do that. I don’t have enough resources or even enough time.” So, connecting to [Travis McIntosh’s] point, because we were already in there, developing and standing up these new characters, that is one thing we changed is a couple of these gambits that felt really hard to achieve. We’ve added conditions to where they trigger so that we’re more certain that if we give you this challenge, you can do it.

We’ve been working with our internal QA and doing playtesting on that. So maybe that’s a long-winded answer to think of one thing that will be improved in this version of the game and is something that I’m glad that we were able to address.

I’ve been playing with an Xbox controller, which is an odd thing to use to play The Last of Us. Were there extended discussions between Naughty Dog and Nixxes about UI and the font for Xbox button prompts or mouse and keyboard icons?

Gallant: Supporting a wide range of player inputs, we were very aligned between Naughty Dog and Nixxes that we wanted to offer tons of customization. We wanted you to be able to remap everything and support tons of different devices. So, in terms of getting the details right in the UI, that was agreat collaboration between Naughty Dog and Nixxes. We were both looking at “how can we create the highest quality experience here? How can we accept whatever input device the player wants to bring?” I think there’s a combo that we support, which is a controller and a mouse. So you can have a controller in one hand and [a] mouse in the other. Some people really like playing that way.

If anything, the biggest thing that we wanted to achieve was just how can we support the widest range possible? How can we just give players whatever devices they want to bring to this experience? How can we make that as great as we can? And for us, that ties in a little bit with being a studio that really values accessibility, and having a wide range of input devices helps us serve a wider audience, and remove barriers from our players.

I’m really happy with how we developed our UI inputs and the wide range of options on PC. And, I’m really thrilled that we got to work with Nixxes and leverage our expertise on that, as well.

Frauenfelder: I think for us also, it was very important. It was also in Part I already. Especially most keyboard support for PC gamers, of course. You need to have solid mouse and keyboard controls in the game; making sure that there is no damping on the mouse. One of the things we gave very high priority was the rebinding menus. Making sure that you can just bind everything on anything that you want, and you can maybe break some things because you can make very weird combinations. But on the other hand, you might actually find specific ways that you can rebind that work for you. So, also back again to those accessibility options. We don’t want to block players to be able to try things out and make it work for them by adding multiple actions to the same button, that we never thought about.

So, no arguments about the fonts then?

Gallant: No, tons of arguments about the fonts, but very constructive. How can we make this font as dope as possible?

What was your approach to the Steam Deck?

Frauenfelder: Well, we’re verified, so we’re super happy with that. And also the scalability, which was one of the things, of course, that was a high priority for us making sure that this game is super scalable on different hardware, AKA the Steam Deck. Steam Deck is such a niche market, but it’s so important. I mean, we’re releasing a game on Steam, so yeah, of course, we have that whole community of Steam Deck players. And those are just like the hardcore PC players with the faster systems. They’re really dedicated.

They find their own ways to improve the game by tweaking settings, etc., and we definitely love supporting them. We added specific Steam Deck presets, making sure that the majority of them can just run the game stable on 30 FPS, directly out of the box. But I’m more than happy to see those forum posts that say, “Hey, you can tweak this and this and you’re still able to hit 30, but then this makes it look a little bit better.” We take the Steam Deck very, very seriously. And I’m super proud that we were able to get it verified by Valve.

Is there a dream Naughty Dog franchise you would like to port next? What Naughty Dog game would Nixxes like to get on PC?

Frauenfelder: For me personally? This was my dream project to do at Nixxes.

Katsman: I think our teams are always excited about working on new things. We haven’t talked about it and these things take a little while, but who knows? Maybe there’s a new project now at Naughty Dog, so who knows what will happen in the future. I think that the team would be crazy excited about that.

No need to answer, but I would love to have the Jak and Daxter trilogy on my Steam Deck. No need to react, but that would be my vote. Personally.

I appreciate that you don’t have to link your PlayStation account to play The Last of Us Part II on Steam. You can skip past that. I think it was the right call to offer a reward for doing so. That seems like the better avenue. Was that an idea from Sony, or were you part of that discussion?

Gallant: I think we’re ultimately not the right people to talk about this on the Sony level.

I can say that we’re really excited that the reward we have for linking your account is the jacket from Intergalactic, which is the game that we have in development right now. It’s Jordan A. Mun’s jacket from that game, and it looks really, really dope on Ellie. I don’t know if you have linked your account and played it at all. But we were really thrilled with how that turned out

We’re excited to start getting people excited for that game, as well.

This is the first bit of Intergalactic content outside of a trailer, I guess, isn’t it?

Gallant: [nods]