Bring napkins, because the next 7 minutes and 23 seconds of your life will be mouth watering. You have of course already seen this demo, but we thought we’d might as well warn you before you watch it again.
The demo showcased a small part of The Last of Us including lush scenery, fancy hotels, sneaking and a really, really tense shootout. There is no doubt in the world that Naughty Dog knows their craft and this is definitely a thing of beauty to look forward to. My only concern is the scripted events and how scripted they really are. What if you take another route into the last room of the demo? Will you still somehow end up on the floor with Ellie stabbing the bad guy? Will Joel always interrupt Ellie if she’s in the middle of a sentence when he hears an enemy nearby? There’s a perfected and natural contextual flow to everything that happens in the gameplay demo, but like with a lot of other trailers it doesn’t always play out that well when you do it yourself.
The Last of Us is looking like a stunner, and I look forward to seeing how many levels of awesome they can put on top of that to prove my doubts wrong.
Was listening yesterday to the game designer from Naughty Dog, Jacob Minkoff, talking about how the events are depending on where you are in the environment. Kinda like the contextual stuff they also had in uncharted where Nathan would reach out and touch the wall if he’s close to it. So if you would go into one room, Ellie might not find and pick up that brick. He also said she would try to always move to a place perpendicular compare to you in order to get a better position to flank a potential enemy. About the guy in the end i’m pretty sure that’s more like a mini-boss, or an event that always will happen, since its such an elaborate animation/cut scene. But then again at the very end it cuts to you crosshair and you have the choice to shoot him or not.
Don’t remember his name, but he’s on the latest Bombcast from E3 and is working on the game. He said / admitted there was a lot that was added JUST for the demo, that might work itself into the full game as they progress. That means a lot of the stuff happening and how people react / things play out is designed specifically for that E3 demo. But as he said, those are things that they probably will work into the game at some point. I bet he’s in a bit of trouble for saying that ;)
Yep interesting that he let that slip :) I guess that last fight with the shotgun-dude might play out as a mini-boss that you cannot avoid. At the same time i heard them saying that you will be able to go through that entire demo in stealth, not alerting any of the guys there, which is great. That way you can conserve ammo and it also encourage more play-throughs.
They also asked about Co-Op, and their answer was that they didn’t talk about that right now. Personally i would love playing this Co-Op, but i realize that brings up quite a lot of problems, for one, Ellie doesn’t use any weapons… What about a sling-shot? :)