Report: The Last of Us 2 Is Under Production For 2015 Release

[ScrabbitRabbit]

Still have yet to play TLoU though the reaction to it's ending seems to be "full closure", "it's great", "brilliant closing point" and so on, so this sucks I guess. Have Naughty Dog been known to make many changes between sequels? I mean storywise. The Crash Bandicoot and Uncharted series may as well be the same games repeated 3 times in terms of story.

Well, Jak 2 was humongous shift in tone and style from Jak and Daxter. Jak 3 was a continuation of Jak 2's story, similar tone, maybe more "epic" and less "edgy."

 

[MrHide-Patten]

So long as the only returning characters are the fungal zombies and potentially Ellie. That aside it's a good 'universe' to set a Zombie Apocalypse in. How's about ya set it in Australia, where everybody doesn't have guns.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

It's a shame it's going to be a PS4 exclusive. I'm not about to drop $500 for just one game.

Could say the same for almost any game in existence, it's nothing new when someone hops onto a forum to say that line, it's been said over a million times, it's not going to make ND pander to those that don't have a PS4.

I didn't have a decent PC for years and I missed out on all them so called "juicy exclusives", but now I have one I'm less than impressed and the same could go for the PS4, if you don't have the money then don't buy one, if you don't think it's wroth then look somewhere else.

It's better to look elsewhere than whine about how something should come to you, life doesn't work that way and it never even should.

That's a neat little rant you have there. Are you really any better than me considering you hopped on a forum to whine about my whining?

Did I imply I was?, that's also nice to equate me telling you what's happened here in general as whining, next thing you know pointing out anything someone doesn't like can be summed up as whining.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Suddenly some people don't want to see TLOU 2?, what so you get to decide what ND creates and you don't think people (let alone a few in the world) want to see a sequel?.

They're free to ride whatever good memories I have of a game into the ground by milking it into a cynical attempt at cashing in on a success that was due, in no small part, to the fact that it was a new, fresh game with a well defined story arc.

I'm free to dislike the move, call it a cynical cash grab, and say this is the sort of shit that is slowly saturating this industry.

You basically had your own say above, what exactly made you quote me, did I diminish your right to rant or something?, have I heavily implied that it's against some sort of law to not like something?.

 

[Animyr]

To be fair, it would be fantastic if they were able to tell another story of Joel and Ellie that equals or tops the quite conclusive original and meshes with it perfectly. But yeah, new characters are probably the most reliably f*ckup-free way to go on this, if they insist on making a sequel.

 

[anthony87]

Maybe they'll call this one "The Rest of Us", or "The Next of Us."

Hey, that last one sounded cool. Humanity clawing its way out of the apocalypse is always a setting I appreciate.

Call it 'The Last of Me' and have it be about Ellie going bonkers as the last human survivor.

Man....I'd play the shit out of that.

 

[AzrealMaximillion]

I've seen The Road with Viggo Mortensen. Good movie. Played TLOU. Overrated in my opinion.

Kinda gettin sick of games with plots that parallel movie get critical acclaim for "amazing stories." Especially when they aren't mechanically up to snuff.

By that logic, why would a movie based on a novel (McCarthy's The Road) be more deserving of praise for the originality of its story than a game that might be inspired by the same novel?

I wasn't aware I praised The Road for originality.

I was more commenting on how Naughty Dog is in the habit of taking to a Hollywood style of storytelling in their games and borrowing heavily from specific movies rather than touching on the themes. Uncharted is parallel to Indiana Jones/Allan Quartermain. The Last of Us is parallel to The Road.

I'm also more commenting on video games that adopt the Hollywood movie style story getting critical acclaim due to story when the mechanics of the games themselves aren't that great.

TLOU is still a good game, mechanically better than most, but I find it weird that it gets critical acclaim based on its story when there are still faults in its gameplay. For example, it handles stealth poorly and for a survival horror game, it gives you way to many items that allow you to survive. The ability to carry a large arsenal of weapons also hurts the survival aspect.

Pretty much exactly what I thought when I read that too.

It's also missing the point. It's more about character development and all that jazz than basic things like premise and plot points, otherwise we would have made a handful of books and not bothered with any more. Besides, TLOU is kinda flattered in comparison to other games, it stands out more than The Road which was pretty dull (the movie, it worked much better as a book).

That's a fair point. But to be honest, TLOU's character development didn't really feel that fresh to me. Maybe I've read and watched too many stories where the protagonist and their young counterpart go against apocalyptic odds lately, but TLOU's story was stupidly predictable. Very well written, but not surprising. Video games have had great character development without their stories running on such similar story patterns that have been used a fair bit.

One of the main problems that modern games with great stories is that they can't seem to incorporate the story within the gameplay mechanics. The story is mostly through either cutscenes or in-game dialogue during down time. The the adversity of the character stuggle is almost always put in either, again, a cutscene or QTE events. Story and mechanics need to mesh more and I think critical acclaim needs to stop favouring story.

I feel that games from the 90s to mids 00s were more fun to play whereas games these days are less fun to play and more fun to watch/listen to. One of the few games of recent memory to mesh story and mechanics well was Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.

I'm hoping AAA developers can adopt a more symbiotic pathology of keeping story and mechanics in equal parts. A bunch of the industry darlings of gaming for the past few years have been praised for story (which has been mostly told through cutscene and scripted events) while lacking gameplay mechanics (annoying linearity, leading players by the nose) have been excused due to the story.

Not saying story isn't important, but story seems to be taking precedence over gameplay and I'm not a fan of that.

 

[Evonisia]

Undisputed? No, whether or not it was one of the best games of 2013 is definitely disputed (I, for one, hated it). But modern philosophy about games does seem to be that if you find success, you beat that success in the the ground. Well whatever, make one sequel or one hundred sequels. I have no interest in this series ever again (unless they decide to drop the shooting), so what they do with the series from here is irrelevant to me

Perhaps by undisputed they meant by critics? It did receive overwhelming positive reviews, compared to say BioShock Infinite and GTA V which were called out on their flaws. I've seen reviews of The Last of Us which didn't even comment on the gameplay or what it was and still gave it big scores or thumbs up.