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?
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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!
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'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.
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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.
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