Reply With QuoteSaw the video a few days ago and loved it, but c'mon, a game being released exclusively for a 5 year-old console? Eff that.
"Consoletardry? In my TTLG?!" It's more likely than you think.
There's something about post-human greenery that really appeals to me. In media form, mind you, much like cyberpunk I probably wouldn't want to be there, but I find it endlessly interesting to explore from the comfort of my computer chair. And while I've enjoyed games and films with Mad Max settings, at the end of the day sand dunes are as dull as dogshit on the sidewalk, whereas I've found that overlaying plants, water, dirt and wildlife over a recognisable urban environment keeps my attention much longer. STALKER's brilliant aesthetic just clicked with me, it rolled me in designer sheets and I'll never get enough. And while I haven't gotten around to it yet, I've been meaning to buy Enslaved: Oddysey to the West just for those magnificent environments they were showcasing the game with. And Logan's Run and I Am Legend come to mind from the movie side.
The Last of Us seems to be pitching us on delivering another fix of that sort. It's advertised as a single-player "third person survival-horror action-adventure" title being put together by a new team in Naughty Dog at the behest of their SCE overlords. "New" team as in not the same roster that features on the credits of the Uncharted series, The Last of Us is supposed to have been in development for two years now. And yes, it's all for the PS3 alone.
So, the game features two lead characters, Male Hawke and Ellen Page, who will be trekking across overgrown American cities and landscapes while, um... surviving. See, while the teaser trailer showed no gameplay, nor did the developers release any actual information about it, much of the gaming press seems to have become really excited so I'm guessing that, much like myself, they're easily distracted by pretty concept art.
Said trailer is "captured directly from a PS3 system", as it eloquently states in its opening, which, once you think about it, means very little and hardly points to it being necessarily representative of the final visual quality of the game, as some journalists seemed to think and then proceed to prematurely cream in their pants.
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Now, there's no point in dreaming about anything even remotely STALKER-like because, frankly, Naughty Dog's bollocks are nowhere near massive enough to pull something like that off. The one thing we do know, gameplay-related, is that Ninja Theory's former lead designer for Enslaved is on this project so it might not be entirely out of line to make some assumptions of similarities in that direction.
Anyway, I'm keeping an eye on this. I like the vibe I'm getting off this thing for now, at least in terms of aesthetics, and I'd definitely like something new to give my PS3 a nice workout. Well, aside from Red Dead Redemption, another one I need to get around to playing some time soon.
Last edited by Ostriig; 16th Dec 2011 at 18:37.
Saw the video a few days ago and loved it, but c'mon, a game being released exclusively for a 5 year-old console? Eff that.
Yeah, it is a pity that this wouldn't get to leverage some modern PC hardware as I imagine some level artists could put it to good use, but I'm not really surprised at Sony putting out a title exclusive to their console.
Great logic there. Because console exclusives are so rare these days.Originally Posted by smallfry
It's a first-party title, for heaven's sake. Why would Sony want to publish their game on rival consoles?
looks damn fun to me. I'll probably get it when it drops to a reasonable price. I don't buy console exclusives for 70 bucks when they come out.
Re: post apocalyptic foliage: Check out Bulletstorm, that game has delivered far more than the critics or the trailers show. I'm having a blast. Mind you the action might stop you from viewing the scenery, but the level designers were ARTISTS.
Also...
???
He's talking about PC, a platform on which Sony has pretty noticeable presence on.
Anyway I agree wholeheartedly with the game writer/creative director's opinion here. Most games are appallingly written and game critics usually fail to recognise this, singing the songs of averageness. Eg the constant praise for Bioware's copypasta, black and white morality filled writing - which is fairly decent at best, but definitely nothing amazing.
Developers like CD Projekt RED have realised a good balance game writing staff, i.e. not contracting someone like an external dead tree media novelist, unless they're involved throughout the development cycle and understand the dynamics of an interactive medium like gaming. On the other side of the coin you often see game's writing duties given to some muppet who might not understand the importance of a proper narrative, like CliffyB.
All that aside all they've shown of the game thus far is fucking cutscene. Getting hyped about the game based upon so little information is pretty silly.Naughty Dog has delivered a scathing verdict on the "poor" standard of storytelling in video games, revealing its aim to "change the f***ing industry" with upcoming PlayStation 3-exclusive The Last of Us.
Speaking at the studio's offices in Santa Monica on Monday, creative director and writer Neil Druckmann told Eurogamer his team wanted to "raise the bar" in order to make other game developers realise: "Okay, I really need to learn the craft of storytelling, I really need to involve my actors in this in order to get realistic performances and realistic actors. That's what we want to do."
He also argued that reviewers were too quick to praise average storytelling, which could hold back the medium's development.
"We try so hard at Naughty Dog to push things," he said. "And then games come out that are fun and exciting and get visceral things right, but to read in reviews that they have an amazing story is disheartening to us because we work so hard at it.
"As critics we need to raise the bar, otherwise no-one's going to change. We're going to keep pushing ourselves, and kill ourselves to make this story happen - but hope that by doing it, the rest of the industry is going to take notice and try to do the same thing."
Elaborating on where other games went wrong, Druckmann, previously lead designer and co-writer on Uncharted 2, told Eurogamer: "We mistake quantity for quality. We don't focus on characters, we focus on monsters or [the] gruesome."
So what is The Last of Us about? "This is going to sound corny, and it might not appeal to gamers, but I would say it's a love story," said Druckmann. "It's not a romantic love story, it's a love story about a father-daughter-like relationship.
"We approached this genre because we felt no-one is getting to the heart of it. It tells you something about the human condition - that's what you want to do as a storyteller.
"We're not saying every game needs a strong, compelling and dramatic story, but if you are going to make a narrative-based game then you better learn the craft."
It's PR, but that particular candor did raise my PC-pride hackles somewhat.
Good on Naughty Dog doing this sort of thing. But the whole "here to save games from themselves at long last" thing only brings to mind all the PC games that probably did it first and/or died on the vine trying to get a cross platform deal.
Sorry consoles, you are the demons not games themselves.
Why would it raise your hackles? It's been true for at least a decade now on every platform everywhere. Narrative is a difficult thing to pull with video games, and PCs haven't been a bastion of innovation for that particular challenge for a while now. Oh there's the odd independent or experimental project that tries, but they're hardly AAA.
What's happened is, somewhere down the line, the industry as a whole decided that entrenching itself in familiarity would pay far more dividends rather than betting the farm on untested ideas, and PC gaming's course-correction happened with the rest of the industry.
It's always been the smaller developers who take the chances - and the pay-off for it is all or nothing. Look at the forums we're posting on, and look at the games we champion, and look at how many of their developers have survived today.
If anyone's to blame for their games not doing well, it's us, the audience. Consoles are the easy target. The fact of the matter is that, as gaming went mainstream over the past decade, we as an audience have been all too accepting of mediocrity and stagnation. How many FPSes have we bought over the last decade compared to the ambitious but slightly broken games like Alpha Protocol? Just about no one bought AP, yet if you look past the patchwork framework of its gameplay systems, it has the most intriguingly malleable story and characters in any game since Deus Ex, and heck it even pushes the DE template forward a bit. And yet no one bought it because of its surface flaws. It's staggering to see how much of a mirror image the gaming landscape is to that of Hollywood when you compare the two.
Customers really only take a portion of the blame for what's on offer. Yeah by and large people get the games scene they deserve, but they also buy what is being sold. It's the interaction of two dynamic systems where each treats the other as static, if that makes any sense. Absolute blame is difficult.
Anyway, it's been true for at least a decade now because Microsoft got into the game and told everyone the future is consoles and a hell of a lot of PC developers and publishers saw the writing on the wall and so the race to the bottom began in earnest. Before that PC and Console games were mostly 'non-overlapping magisteria'.
I suppose it was probably inevitable that they would overlap as the power of the things increased. But damn it was ugly.
Where my hackles get raised is that there's people who see the history of games entirely through consoles and nothing else. And there's a lot of them. So should Naughty Dog succeed in this revolution (which I hope they do. Could just be very chatty Dragons Lair for all we know, however) I would bet good money everything they do has been done on PC some time ago with not so nice graphics. Yet they will get all the credit for this earth shattering innovation. Heck they'll probably ride the wave of gaming's long awaited credibility into major awards ceremonies that have finally added games recognition etc etc.
Yeah, stupidity is everywhere, and there's no point getting annoyed about it. But what's a good fanboy moment otherwise.
The only thing that annoys me about that is that one of the writers of Uncharted is banging on about how terrible the state of writing is in the games industry. I mean, I enjoy the Uncharted games for their light-hearted shooty-adventuring malarkey, but the writing? Surely I'm not the only one who sees irony here?
As for the last of us, this looks like it'll be Enslaved but with vaguely realistic "survival" elements. From what little you can tell from a barely-relevant CGI render. If this "changes the f-ing industry", I will buy a particularly large hat and consume it with a side salad and chips.
I, for one, don't see the irony. The games aren't deep in their writing, but they are eminently well crafted, and that includes the writing. Granted, a lot of that is in the performance, but they pull off their genre really well. Perhaps not Raiders of the Lost Ark level, but then nothing reaches that level.
Uncharted is just a melting pot for cliches - there's nothing original or surprising, it's functional but hardly exceptional storytelling, but is well-paced and backed up by stellar gameplay. The dialogue is grating and guessable, the characters all 2D archetypes. Like I said, I love the Uncharted games, but I wouldn't hold them up as a good example of game writing.
In which the main characters fight nazis over a magic macguffin ending in a deus ex machina.
What's that got to do with anything? The quality of a film's writing has nothing to do with its subject matter.
Thanks for making this thread noteworthy
I don't even know when people are joking here, any more. Subject and plot are parts of a film's writing - indeed some of the most important parts, as everything must necessarily relate to them. Stating that they're unrelated is first-order absurdity. You have claimed that the quality of an applie pie is irrespective of the quality of the apples.
(P.S.: Indiana Jones works in large part because it's a comedy, and so farce is part and parcel of its makeup.)
It helps if you have an awesome plot but bad writing can ruin anything, no matter how good the premise. Similarly, good writing can raise even the most mundane to greatness.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. Plot, yes, perhaps - but not subject matter. You can have a fantastically written film in any genre, on any topic. You can have great writing in a comedy, an action adventure, drama, horror film etc. Subject matter is what a film is about - writing, as much as direction, acting, editing, cinematography, determine the *how*. A film about what is usually seen as 'important' or 'deep' subject matter is in no way inherently better written.
To use your metaphor: I've claimed that an apple pie can be good, well-prepared food as much as a steak dinner as much as a five-course French menu. Raiders of the Lost Ark may be a hamburger of a movie, but it's a nearly perfectly made hamburger.
Some gameplay footage here.
Quite like the look of this; the environment is suitably 'overgrown apocalypse' and the combat seems pretty fierce.
I like that the girl is like "What the fuck man" after he torches that guy. The player here is a bit of an asshole. Strangling that guy and opening fire before the other guys have even done anything. Not to mention executing the guy at the end. Clearly they've made it this actionpacked because it's supposed to show off the combat but I'm sensing a The Road-vibe here, in how the characters are handled. The little girl is supposed to make you think twice before chosing the violent path, because you wanna be an inspiration for her. Hopefully her behaviour will be affected by your playslyle, so how pacifist or psycho she is depends on the example you set.
Kinda wish I had a PS3 now.
Probably, but as the road shows the parent will go to any length to protect the kid, these people are pretty much day-z players, all out to get you and eat your daughter like she was a can of beans.The little girl is supposed to make you think twice before chosing the violent path, because you wanna be an inspiration for her. Hopefully her behaviour will be affected by your playslyle, so how pacifist or psycho she is depends on the example you set.
Kinda wish I had a PS3 now.
I don't think there's any pacifist playstyle, it's just a big trip of extreme things you'll do to protect your child.
Another one that looks good but we'll have to wait and see.
Hey guys guys does everything have to be a 3rd person action adventure now?
Definitely interested in this one - but more than this I hope that The Last Guardian isn't dead. Perhaps E3 will reveal something about that game's current situation...
Limited inventory (and thankfully no tetris), crafting, no regen health. I'm really liking the looks of this.
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