Well, what do you know? The people who made Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter and Uncharted are now making something terrific-looking called The Last of Us
The trailer for Naughty Dogâs new PlayStation 3 game premiered on Saturday. A few details have been trickling out, too. Letâs round them up and see what weâve got.
First, weâve got an official description from the gameâs creative director, Neil Druckmann and its game director, Bruce Straley: âThe Last of Us is a genre-defining experience that blends survival and action elements to tell a character driven tale about a modern plague decimating mankind,â they told Naughty Dogâs in-house blogger. âNature encroaches upon civilization, forcing remaining survivors to kill for food, weapons and whatever they can find. Joel, a ruthless survivor, and Ellie, a brave young teenage girl who is wise beyond her years, must work together to survive their journey across what remains of the United States.â
This is somewhat familiar ground for Last of Us designer Mark Richard Davies, who previously worked as the lead designer on Namco and Ninja Theoryâs acclaimed game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. That 2010 adventure featured a male-female duo racing across a United States that was ravaged by some sort of invaders and overgrown by nature. But Enslaved was more sci-fi than survival-horror and it was far more fantastical. Itâs leads were Mad Max-looking future soldiers. The Last of Us stars what appears to be an ordinary man and an ordinary teenage girl.
https://lastchance.cc/review-enslaved-odyssey-to-the-west-5655269%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
The gameâs trailer was rendered entirely in-engine. These are real video game graphics, if not shot from playable camera angles.
The trailer mostly speaks for itself. It doesnât reveal anything about how the game will play, but it does set up its own version of a vivid, green post-apocalypse. As it ends, we hear Ellie make a comment that suggests she doesnât remember a time when people were just âgoing about their livesâ on the ravaged streets of the United States. âIt must have been nice,â she says. If sheâs too young to remember the good old days that Joel misses, then the cataclysmic event that transformed the gameâs world probably took place a dozen or so years before the era in which the game is set.
The new game is deep into development. Creative director Druckmann says that he has been working on the game for two years. Elsewhere, Naughty Dog confirmed that it is no longer a one-game-at-a-time studio. The Last of Us has been made in parallel to Uncharted 3. A two-team studio can, in theory, produce a game a year, and that could peg The Last of Us as a 2012 release, but there is no confirmed release year for it yet.
There was a teaser for the game in Uncharted 3 Before most people even knew that Naughty Dog was making The Last Of Us, clever gamers found a teaser for the game in Naughty Dogâs Uncharted 3. You know, I spent a lot of time looking at the newspaperâs in that gameâs bar. I knew there was something hiding there!
Hereâs a clip in which a gamer explains how Uncharted 3 teases the new gameâthis clip was put on YouTube one day before Naughty Dogâs involvement was revealed.
You, like me, may not initially see how that tease actually teases anything. To appreciate it, you have to know that The Last of Us was initially teased through a pair of abstract videos, one that featured a man reminiscing about the good old days while real-life footage of riots and disasters played; the other clip featured an ant. That ant video, IGN reported, was snagged from the BBC documentary Planet Earth, specifically from a section about a parasitic fungus called Cordyceps.
This is the BBC Planet Earth footage Naughty Dog used on their Last of Us website, with the original voice-over that was stripped out for the teaser. The idea of a killer, parasitic fungus that controls the movement of its hosts fits with the trailer and description of The Last of Us. After all, weâve got the idea of ânature encroach[ing] on civilizationâ and bad guys in the trailer who look like theyâve got, well, some sort of fungus bursting from their body. Watch the BBC clip. Itâs as creepy as it gets.
Uh, so the Cordyceps thing is actually really depressing, but in happier news, the gameâs lead voice actors are Troy Baker, who is also voicing the lead character in next yearâs BioShock Infinite, and Ashley Johnson, who has not had any major gaming roles but did voice work for Ben 10 and Teen Titans cartoons. It may be too early to confirm this, but Troy Baker may be vying for the video game voice-acting ubiquity of the male lead of Naughty Dogâs Uncharted series, Nolan North.
Weâll be keeping an eye out for more news about Naughty Dogâs big new game. Odds are that these people will, too.
