The Last of Us Versions: Part I vs Remastered vs PS3

Platinuming The Last of Us on PS3 means finishing the campaign on Easy, Normal, Hard and Survivor — and then finishing all four again on New Game+. Platinuming The Last of Us Part I means finishing it once, on whatever difficulty you feel like, and petting a dog. Same twelve chapters, same script, same performances. Completely different ask.

That gap is the clearest proof that "The Last of Us" is not one game you can buy in a few resolutions. There are six shipped releases across four platforms, and they differ in engine, trophy list, control scheme, accessibility toolkit and whether multiplayer exists at all. Buy the wrong one and you either overpay for a story you can get for a fraction of the price, or you lose a mode that is only in the version you skipped.

No story spoilers below — this is purely about what is in each box. If you want the story stuff, the The Last of Us coverage hub has it, and everything else lives on the Mythras blog.

Every version, and where it runs

Two facts in that table trip people constantly. Part I never came to PS4 — if a PS4 is your only console, Remastered is your ceiling, and that is fine. And Remastered never got a native PS5 release; it runs on PS5 through backward compatibility, which is exactly how the multiplayer stayed alive.

Remastered is a port, Part I is a rebuild

These two words get used interchangeably in store listings and they should not be. Remastered took the 2013 build and pushed it harder. Part I threw the 2013 build away.

What Remastered did in July 2014: 1080p output, 60 frames per second, higher-resolution character models, improved shadows and lighting, upgraded textures, a longer draw distance and a pile of glitch fixes. There is an optional 30fps lock in the settings for anyone who found the jump jarring, and plenty of players in 2014 did.

It also went hard on the DualShock 4. Collectible recordings play out of the controller speaker instead of pinning you to a menu, the flashlight click comes through the speaker too, the lightbar shifts from green to orange to red as you take damage, and the touchpad scrolls your inventory. Listen Mode moved from R2 to R1, though you can revert that in the settings if PS3 muscle memory is fighting you.

The content bundle is the real argument for it: Left Behind, the Abandoned Territories map pack and the Reclaimed Territories map pack are all included, along with a director's commentary track over every cinematic featuring Neil Druckmann, Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson. Photo Mode arrived in a post-launch update.

Remastered still holds a 95 on Metacritic from 69 critics. Part I sits at 89. If you are buying on review scores alone, the eight-year-old port wins — which tells you something about how much of this game's reputation is the writing rather than the rendering.

What Part I actually changed under the hood

Part I was rebuilt on Naughty Dog's Part II technology, and the changes go well past pixel count:

• Enemy and companion AI is the Part II system. Stalkers in particular now behave like their Part II selves, breaking away and hiding after they land a hit instead of charging you down like runners.
• The weapon upgrade system is lifted from Part II, and the UI generally matches its sequel rather than the 2013 menus.
• Recoil is meaningfully higher, which turns the recoil stat at the workbench from a nice-to-have into something you actually budget parts for. Our weapons guide covers that spend order.
• Facial animation is driven by the original cast's performance capture. In 2013 in-game faces were largely neutral; in Part I you can read Tess's dread and Joel's flinches. The screenshot above is the same beat in both versions.
• Collectible memos are held in Joel's hands rather than opened from a menu, which keeps you in the world while you read.
• You can throw a brick or bottle while running, physics apply to loose props on tables, and shivs look like screwdrivers rather than blades.
• Permadeath and Speedrun Mode are new, plus extra skins for Joel and Ellie. Both sit on top of whatever difficulty you pick — the difficulty modes guide breaks that stacking down.
• Over 60 accessibility options, including a full Audio Description mode for cinematics and a feature that outputs dialogue as haptic feedback through the DualSense. Naughty Dog put that ahead of what Part II shipped with.
• Native 4K at a 30fps target or dynamic 4K at 60, with variable refresh rate unlocking frame rates past 60 on either mode. Motion matching, DualSense adaptive triggers and 3D audio round it out.

Now the part the marketing skipped. Part II's dodge and prone are not in Part I. The levels are still 2013 levels — arena shapes, cover placement, sightlines — and reviewers who criticised the remake mostly pointed at exactly that. This is not "Part II's combat system dropped into the first game." It is the first game's combat, run on a smarter brain, in unchanged rooms.

If you are coming to Part I straight off Part II expecting to slide under a swing, you will eat that swing. Recalibrate before you pick a difficulty.

The trophy lists are not the same game

This is the single biggest practical difference between the versions and nobody mentions it in the store description.

The PS3 and PS4 list carries No Matter What in Easy, Normal, Hard and Survivor flavours, plus The Last of Us in Easy+, Normal+, Hard+ and Survivor+ — eight separate completion trophies, all of them sitting inside the 23 the platinum demands. Outside the platinum there are 10 more for Left Behind, 7 each for the Abandoned Territories and Reclaimed Territories map packs, and 2 for Grounded mode. Remastered did not add a single new trophy, but it did soften eight of them: the map-pack trophies dropped to five downs or executions and lost the no-deaths clause entirely.

Part I collapses all of that into No Matter What — complete Part I, one gold, no difficulty attached, and Don't Go — complete Left Behind, likewise. What is left is a collection platinum: every Firefly pendant, comic, artifact, optional conversation, Ellie joke, training manual, workbench, workbench tool, safe and shiv door, plus upgrading and breaking one of every melee weapon and fully upgrading a single gun. Our collectibles guide maps the ones people miss.

The rest of Part I's list is a set of one-off gags that only exist in the remake — pet Buckley the dog, play Jak X in Left Behind, win the brick-throwing contest, beat Black Fang without taking a hit, win the watergun fight, and lure an infected into attacking a human. That last one is the sort of thing you have to deliberately set up. The PC release mirrors all 29 as Steam achievements.

Factions only exists on the old versions

Factions MP is the 2013 game's competitive mode: you lead a clan of survivors across a 12-week season, every match counts as one day, and supplies you scavenge in Supply Raid, Survivors and Interrogation feed the people back home. Leaving a match hurts your clan. It is one of the most quietly stressful multiplayer designs Sony ever shipped.

Here is where it stands now:

• PS3 servers went offline in 2019. That version of Factions is gone.
• Remastered's servers stayed up. You can still play it on PS4, and on PS5 through backward compatibility, with an active PlayStation Plus subscription.
• Part I shipped without it, which was one of the loudest criticisms at launch given the $69.99 price.
• The replacement is not coming. Naughty Dog announced in December 2023 that it had ceased development on The Last of Us Online, the standalone multiplayer game that had been in the works since 2019, rather than turn itself into a live-service studio.

So if Factions is why you are buying, Remastered is not the budget option — it is the only option. Check server status before you commit money, because that is the one thing on this page that can change without warning.

Part II versus Part II Remastered

The sequel's split is simpler and much cheaper. Part II launched on PS4 on June 19, 2020. Part II Remastered arrived on PS5 on January 19, 2024 and on PC on April 3, 2025.

If you own the PS4 version digitally, the upgrade is $10 and your save files import. If you own it on disc, read the fine print: you need a PS5 with an optical drive, and you have to insert the PS4 disc every single time you want to download or launch the remaster. PS5 Digital Edition owners with a disc cannot take the discounted path at all.

What the $10 buys you:

Technically it runs native 4K in Fidelity Mode and 1440p upscaled to 4K in Performance Mode, with an unlocked frame rate option for VRR displays, higher texture resolution, longer level-of-detail distances, better shadows and a higher animation sampling rate. Accessibility gained descriptive audio and a speech-to-vibration feature that pushes dialogue cadence through the DualSense.

No Return alone justifies the ten dollars — it is the only place in the series where you get to play as characters the campaign never hands you. Our No Return guide covers the unlock order and the six bosses, and the Part 2 skills guide covers the campaign trees, which are identical between the two releases.

PC, PS5 Pro and the performance picture

The PC story is worth flagging because it has moved a lot.

Part I hit PC on March 28, 2023 and the launch was rough enough to matter: long shader compilation stalls, crashes, graphical glitches and hardware requirements out of proportion to what was on screen. It landed at 59 on Metacritic against the PS5 version's 89 — a 30-point gap for the same game. Patches fixed most of it, and the version you would buy today is not the version that got reviewed. Part II Remastered's PC release on April 3, 2025 went out much cleaner.

On PS5 Pro, both PS5 titles were updated in October 2024, ahead of the console's November 7 launch. Part II Remastered's patch 1.2.0 added a dedicated Pro rendering mode that renders at 1440p and upscales to 4K using PSSR while targeting 60fps, and the existing Fidelity and Performance modes run better on Pro hardware than on a base PS5. Part I received its own PS5 Pro optimisation update in the same window.

Which one you should actually buy

Straight answers, no hedging:

You own a PS5 and have never played it → Part I. The performance capture faces, the Part II AI and the 60-plus accessibility options are worth it, and the platinum is a single relaxed playthrough plus a collectible sweep rather than eight campaign runs.

You own a PS4 and nothing newer → Remastered. This is not a consolation prize. It is a 95-rated package with every piece of DLC in the box, a commentary track and the multiplayer.

You want Factions → Remastered, and a PlayStation Plus subscription. Nothing else has it and nothing else is going to.

You already own Remastered and it runs fine on your PS5 → think hard. Part I is a better-looking, better-animated, more accessible version of a story you have already heard. If you are replaying it for the writing, you have the writing. If you want to feel the game again rather than remember it, Part I earns the money.

You are moving on to the sequel → Part II Remastered. Ten dollars if you have the PS4 digital version, and No Return is genuinely a new game mode rather than a bullet point.

You are on PC → Part I and Part II Remastered. Both are there, both are patched, and neither has ever had Factions to lose.

You only want the Ellie and Riley chapter → Left Behind standalone. It has been sold on its own since May 2015 and does not need the base game. The Left Behind guide covers what is missable in it.

Quick Action Checklist

• Confirm your console first: Part I is PS5 and PC only, and Remastered never got a native PS5 version.
• Buying for the multiplayer? Only Remastered still has Factions, and it needs PlayStation Plus. The PS3 servers closed in 2019.
• Trophy hunters: the Part I platinum is 29 trophies with no difficulty requirement; the PS3/PS4 platinum needs four difficulty completions plus four New Game+ runs.
• Own Part II on PS4 digitally? Take the $10 upgrade — saves import. Disc owners need a PS5 with an optical drive and must insert the disc every launch.
• Do not expect Part II's dodge or prone in Part I. The AI is new, the level design is still 2013.
• On a PS5 Pro, run Part II Remastered's Pro mode — 1440p with PSSR upscaling to 4K at a 60fps target.
• Left Behind is included in Remastered and Part I, and sold separately since May 2015 if you want only that chapter.
• If the PC port's reputation put you off Part I, that reputation is from March 2023 and has been patched since.