Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2012-06-20 11:50 am
rionaleonhart) wrote2012-06-20 11:50 am
Good Job With All The, You Know, Killing And Stuff.
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?
(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?
no subject
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.