KALEL114
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This is a great article discussing the game, how it came to be, a lost iPad containing the trailer, and how freaked out they got when they saw that Dead Island trailer. Here are some things that stuck out that are game related.
"If you break down the trailer, all the action there is meaningful," says Straley. "It's teasing the different kind of mechanics you're going to be playing with in the gameplay set-ups. There's some melee and a gun - where that goes as a strategy is kind of intriguing."
Contrary to evidence in the trailer, however, The Last of Us is "not a zombie game," insists Straley. Druckmann explains: "If the game was about the monsters, we would have not showed them. The story's not about them, so [we thought] let's get it out of the way."
Instead, he wants us to consider the relationship between its two lead characters. Joel is a survivor and anti-hero (played by Troy Baker), and Ellie is a 14 year-old girl (played by 28 year-old Ashley Johnson) with no memory of the world pre-apocalypse.
"What are those non-verbal signs [in the trailer] saying about how long they've known each other. What about the other non-infected person?"
The game will play out across various US cities and it's suggested that survival will involve both killing and scavenging. Do you control Joel alone? Ellie? Both? Is it co-op? Naughty Dog isn't saying.
"It's story-driven, [but] the whole triangle is story, gameplay and art," says Straley. "As a gamer it's all about strategy and giving the player enough tools in their toolkit so that they can come upon something and choose and have the consequences play out within their choices."
How those choices play out remains unclear, but don't expect any kind of Heavy Rain-esque branching narrative. "We're telling it the way we've been developing this method at Naughty Dog," explains Druckmann. "We're evolving it, but I can't say anymore."
With a bloody corpse, a brutal murder, a bullet to the face and a knife to the back of an infected human in the trailer alone, The Last of Us is set to be Naughty Dog's most violent game yet. But Druckmann insists it will not be "gratuitous - the monsters are not the focus. It's the relationship between Joel and Ellie."
So if not a horror game, what is it? "This is going to sound corny and it might not appeal to gamers, but I would say it's a love story," he says. "It's not a romantic love story, it's a love story about a father-daughter-like relationship."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-13-the-last-of-us-previewWhen the fruits of this labour of love will be shared with gamers, no-one is saying. And, in the wake of the brutal crunch endured by the Uncharted 3 team in order to meet a release date it recklessly announced a year in advance, that should come as no surprise.
"We will never do that again, not a year out," sighs co-president Christophe Balestra. Wells agrees: "The minute we saw [the date] on screen we were like, oh god, I really regret that."
So, while the game has already been in development for two years, with the team not yet ready even to discuss gameplay let alone show it, don't be surprised if The Last of Us fails to materialise before 2013. It'll be done when it's done, as the saying goes.
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