Good Job With All The, You Know, Killing And Stuff.

[rionaleonhart]

E3 this year introduced a fairly lengthy gameplay trailer for The Last of Us, Naughty Dog's upcoming post-apocalyptic game. It looks amazing, but so violent. I'm really hoping Naughty Dog include an option to tone it down slightly, make combat a bit less brutal somehow, for the benefit of, er, massive wimps like me who want to play a nice non-violent game about survivors ruthlessly murdering each other in the wake of the zombie apocalypse.

(I'M REALLY NOT OKAY WITH HOLDING SOMEONE HOSTAGE SO YOU CAN SHOOT ALL HIS FRIENDS AND THEN KILLING THE HOSTAGE. I'M JUST NOT ALL RIGHT WITH THAT. I DON'T CARE IF THEY'RE MADE OF PIXELS. This is the problem with realism in games! If the enemy won't risk shooting at you when you're holding one of their own at gunpoint, I'll go 'oh, they care about each other!' and then I can't kill them. I never felt morally conflicted about jumping on a Goomba!)

The Last of Us isn't the sort of game that would generally interest me at all, actually. When I ask myself why I'm so curious about it, I come up with two answers:

– it's by Naughty Dog, who made the Jak and Daxter and Uncharted games, which are excellent, and
– the fourteen-year-old girl. Without the fourteen-year-old girl, this trailer would just be a guy brutally killing a load of other guys. If Joel didn't have any friends or allies, if he interacted solely with people who were trying to kill him, I wouldn't touch this game with a ten-foot pole. Put a teenage girl on his side, though, and suddenly there's a human element that intrigues me.

I'd actually previously assumed, based on – now that I think about it – probably no evidence, that the fourteen-year-old girl was going to be the player character. I find myself oddly disappointed to be wrong. It would have been an interesting departure from, you know, more or less every videogame ever.

Come to think of it, there's a bit of a trend in Naughty Dog series. Jak and Daxter was an enjoyable but unremarkable platformer; Jak II and Jak 3 (don't ask me, I didn't do the numbering) were better by far. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was solid enough, but its sequels were fantastic. Perhaps I should wait for The Last of Us II, although apocalyptic scenarios don't really seem to lend themselves to sequels. The Last of Us II: Turns Out There Were Actually More of Us?

Comments

[dev-chieftain.livejournal.com]

You clearly should write all of the sequels, because your titles are excellent!

In all seriousness, I wouldn't have expected the 14 year old girl to be the PC, but now that you've mentioned the idea I, too, am thoroughly disappointed that she isn't. That could have been pretty interesting in some ways!

Post-apocalyptic as it's seen in most current interpretations bothers me, honestly, because it's all a bleak desert and ruder, meaner cowboys. Basically, Mad Max apocalyptica. I'm tired of that!

[rionaleonhart]

I should write all of the sequels. I certainly wouldn't do anything mad like switch from Roman to Arabic numerals between games. Although I suppose it could have been worse (Jak 1, Jak II and Jak C?).

I seriously have no idea what made me look at a game with a fourteen-year-old girl and a grizzled man in his forties with obvious combat experience and go 'WELL CLEARLY SHE IS GOING TO BE THE PLAYER CHARACTER'. Apparently I know nothing about the videogame industry.

[dev-chieftain.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, yes. Next, Jak the Fourth just to really complicate matters.

The videogame industry, by contrast, apparently knows nothing about how to market, because if you thought that and were excited about it, that means they missed out on a good opportunity to buck the trend!

[sparrowsabre7.livejournal.com]

My main problem was that he killed them at all. Surely in that scenario avoiding confrontation is the best course of action? They weren't aware of their presence, they could've left. If they opened fire first, then sure, understandable, but the way the demo showed it, it didn't feel that way.

'I am alive' handled it better, where you were only forced to kill the guys trying to kill you and if they surrended you just knocked them out. And there were some confrontations you could avoid completely.

[rionaleonhart]

You're right, he was definitely the aggressor. It made me very uncomfortable. I do get the impression that perhaps Joel is meant to be quite a dark character, though, in which case... well, I'm still uncomfortable, but at least I'm supposed to be uncomfortable.

Maybe there was an alternative to charging in and killing them all and the demo just wanted to showcase the combat system? If there's no alternative and I get over my squeamishness enough to play this game, I'm probably going to end up sauntering out into the open and getting shot at whenever an enemy appears, just to make absolutely certain it's an enemy. This is a post-apocalyptic world! There aren't many people left! We can't afford to go around killing each other!

(Of course, if there is an alternative I'm not sure I'll be competent enough to take it, because I am absolutely terrible at stealth.)

[sparrowsabre7.livejournal.com]

Yeah that's probably what it was. Cos they showcased some of the stealth mechanics while taking them out. I'm pretty sure it's still supposed to make you feel uncomfortable regardless though.

I just hope there are people who are just trying to get by in the game too. Not everyone in the apocalypse is gonna be a murdering psycho. In IAA there were people who would point a gun and tell you to keep your distance, but would not act aggressive.

I remember one time where there was one such person guarding some supplies, but I thought I might need them to help another survivor. I killed them and took the supplies, which turned out to just be a can of soda and then went to pick up their gun and the item notification said "empty gun" and I felt like shit.

Of course, chances are that was just to make me feel crap and if I had let them attack they would've magically had a full clip, but I still felt like a douche for it... games like this need more stuff like that, real "what have I done?" moments to increase immersion.

[tiger-pause.livejournal.com]

I'd actually previously assumed, based on – now that I think about it – probably no evidence, that the fourteen-year-old girl was going to be the player character.

I DID THAT TOO! I watched the trailer with two of my friends and afterwards they both started talking about how useful the girl might end up being as a side character and it was only then that I thought 'oh, maybe you play as the guy'. The thought of playing as the dude genuinely hadn't occurred to me until I heard others talking about it. Good to know someone else came to the same conclusion! Seriously, 14-year-old girl protagonist, how awesome would that be.

[rionaleonhart]

I'm glad I'm not the only one! I suppose Ellie was the first character to appear in the first trailer I saw and then did the voiceover narration at the end, which must have added up in my head to 'she's the main character'.