The Last of Us

[soggybagel]

The Last of Us is a third person survival action game being developed by Naughty Dog. It takes place in a post apocalyptic America where some unknown plague has wiped out a lot of humanity. Thankfully, it's not ZOMBIES!

From the sounds of things this is a direct response from Naughty Dog to the world of Uncharted and the various action packed/adventuring adventures of Nathan Drake. In so much that in Uncharted you were mowing down hundreds of enemies, throwing grenades that blow up piles of dudes, and jumping out of planes with nary a scratch on you, The Last of Us looks to take a much more grounded and realistic approach to combat and the implications of what a showdown could be. The very fact that you may bring a gun in to a confrontation can be monumental versus fighting hand to hand. On top of that, it appears that ammo will be very limited and as far as everything I've heard, the idea is you minimize and will want to avoid confrontations as much as possible. Each confrontation is designed to be tense and truly a struggle for survival.

As someone who doesn't own a PS3, I'm very very interested in this title. It goes to the heart of addressing an issue that has been raised on Idle Thumbs but also many other places regarding the bizarre and jarring dichotomy of wrapping a story in supposedly very real life and death stakes, but when the gameplay begins you end up mowing down millions of dudes and fighting your way through an army all the while brazenly jumping off cliffs, flipping cars, etc.

It was somewhat disappointing though to be expected that at E3 the big video demo showed a very action packed sequence filled with gun combat, unarmed struggle, and ultimately culminated in a violent end. I've heard though that you could play that same scenario a lot different. I also read that the bigger behind closed doors demo they gave to a lot of press shows a much slower paced game that looks to ratchet up the tension in very grounded ways.

E3 Demo: [media=]

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As far as gameplay goes not that much is known but I'd expect it to handle a lot like Uncharted. And although you'll be escorting a young girl around a lot of the game, everything I"ve heard or read is that you're not really hand holding here. She gets out of the way intelligently and hangs back when needed. I would expect that the people over at Naughty Dog are smart enough to avoid the very terrible aspects of gameplay that can arrive when you've got an AI friend following you.

Knowing thumbs listeners/readers, I think that this game is something that should appeal to a lot of us. Now its hard to read through a lot of the press clippings, but I do think Naughty Dog could do something really special here. Far too often games put us in a mode that doesn't really force us to think about what we're really doing. By heightening the danger of the world, enforcing a more conservative pace, and hopefully avoiding an overly didactic approach to gameplay, this could really be amazing experience.

[syntheticgerbil]

I was excited for this, but I think that gameplay demo killed it. It just ended with multiple people screaming FUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKK like a bunch of meatheads and it got ridiculously violent over nothing. There goes the hope for a concentration on Naughty Dog doing something more with the adventure/exploring aspects they had really going on in the beginning of Uncharted 3. This seems like this could have been this game, but the exploring in the gameplay trailer just sort of showed walking around and dodging violent encounters.

Also, I could have sworn we already had a thread for this game, but it appears the new search function is ass so I wouldn't know.

[toblix]

While I admit the search function isn't very good, a search for the word last revealed this thread, with which this one should probably be merged. In case you missed the search box completely, it's in the top right corner of the page.

Also, I'm looking forward to this.

[syntheticgerbil]

EDIT: I see what I did, going up to the top from any page to search automatically has "this topic" turned on in which to search from. I didn't notice that before. Nevermind.

[soggybagel]

I was excited for this, but I think that gameplay demo killed it. It just ended with multiple people screaming FUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKK like a bunch of meatheads and it got ridiculously violent over nothing. There goes the hope for a concentration on Naughty Dog doing something more with the adventure/exploring aspects they had really going on in the beginning of Uncharted 3. This seems like this could have been this game, but the exploring in the gameplay trailer just sort of showed walking around and dodging violent encounters.

Also, I could have sworn we already had a thread for this game, but it appears the new search function is ass so I wouldn't know.

Yeah as I stated the gameplay video that was shown from everything I've heard is kind of the opposite of how the game usually is. Which is annoying why they show that, but it does at the very least show that it isn't a typical run and gun ala Uncharted. But as typical with a lot of big events like this, they want to show a big action packed event as opposed to a sullen 15 minute sneak fest.

Also, I searched "Last of US" which as a search string had words they didn't like, and when I searched Last I must have not highlighted Topic Title only because I missed it. I mean, if someone wants to merge this, or kill this one, that is fine, but the former topic hadn't had a new post in it since December 2011. I'm not in charge here so I can't do much, but if people feel like this should be closed I don't care. That said, this is kind of the first real news we've had of the game in a long while with actual gameplay and what not so I don't think its too big of a deal redundancy aside.

[syntheticgerbil]

I like you writing up on it very much so, didn't mean to bag on you. Often threads get merged unless the one before is long closed, so that's probably what will happen here once a mod or admin sees it.

You can't search "Last of Us" without quotes since it has "of" and "us" which are too small.

[youmeyou]

Also your user icon is excellent, so you can do whatever you want.

"I love the smell of sewers in the morning!"

[soggybagel]

I tried searching "Last of us" in quotes and it didn't work. Oh well, I probably just fucked it up.

[Fancy Corndog]

I don't really understand the big deal people are making over the violence in this game. I mean, video games. Maybe it's a testament to how realistically they're portraying it.

My most anticipated thing about this game so far is the real-time backpack action and the fact that bullets are rare and hurt people.

The thing that I'm most worried about is the game being heavily scripted. Guess we'll find out next year.