The Playstation Experience has gifted us with a couple of big items from Naughty Dog. Namely the sequel to the best story game of all time, The Last of Us. Personally, I’m SUPER excited about this as given my taste for the dark I just adore TLOU.
And more Uncharted 4 (in the form of a huge DLC):
Aren’t we the lucky ones?
Title: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End
System: PS4
Genre: Story based Climber/Shooter
Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Date Played: May 2016
Rating: Best looking game ever made!
Of course I had to play and review Uncharted 4. It pretty much goes without saying. My collector’s edition box came on launch day and I finished it over the next week. It probably took me about 20-24 hours as I take my time and I’m very thorough. I collected about 95% of the treasures and almost all the journal entries/extra convos etc. So let’s jump into it, topic by topic:
Story 8/10 and character 9/10. The UC4 story itself is superficially generic, involving the return of Nathan Drake’s long lost brother Sam, which precipitates Nathan leaving his “retirement” and (temporarily) Elena. Nathan is thereafter thrown into pursuit of the “biggest pirate treasure in history,” an adventure that takes him to Panama, Louisiana, Italy, Scotland, Madagascar, and (largely) Captain Avery’s nearby pirate island and its requisite “lost city.” There are also a couple flashbacks to the Drake boy’s younger days. Mostly the story is an excuse for modern pirate adventures and more importantly, character development between Nathan and Sam & Elena. This development, basically constructed from constant back and forth between the (usually two) party members seamlessly accompanies nearly all of Uncharted‘s gameplay.
Elena, like my wife, lets Nathan play video games
In fact, Drake is almost never alone, and for good reason. This “buddy system story telling” at Naughty Dog was born out of Jak & Daxter. The idea with Daxter was to provide the “witty repartee” to help liven up the game, an idea we basically got from Disney movies and their endless string of comedic sidekicks. They intervening 15 years has seen the concept grow in sophistication, but the core idea is the same. In UC4, the dialog is not just funny (although it often is), but genuinely character building.
UC4 isn’t as somber, emotionally wrenching, or deep as Naughty Dog’s other similar-genre hit, The Last of Us (TLOU), but the level of character interaction between Drake and his family does bring out real warmth and personality. Basically, the game lives up to being a Raiders / Die Hard type summer blockbuster. It’s kinda about the action, but really excels because you care. Please note that this depth is rarely present in video games (does Call of Duty evoke any emotion?) or even summer blockbusters where creators too often believe 40 minutes of slamming through buildings develops character.
So while UC4 is not the story/character masterpiece that is TLOU — it’s also a lot lighter hearted.
That Sam is just a bit more selfish than Nathan is telegraphed by his slightly shiftier features
Voice Acting & Animation 10/10. Taking into account the current state of technology, video game character rendering just doesn’t get better than UC4. I’m sure Sony’s eventual PS5 and Naughty Dog’s eventual PS5 title will improve on it, but barring that, the characters just look and move superbly. The voice acting is really stellar too, particularly given the sometime “cheese” factor of the pirate story. The quality of the writing and delivery sell it time and time again.
The Drake brothers have very strong forearms
Graphics 11/10. The elephant in the room. No, the titanosaur argentinosaurus huinculensis in the room is how gorgeous the game looks. UC4 isn’t the most stylized game ever, but for hands down gorgeous “realistic” graphics there is no better looking game yet made. It’s even better looking than Witcher 3: Blood & Wine (which is pretty gorgeous). The UC4 graphics aren’t really that naturalistic either, as the color and detail are pumped up in a sort of HDR hyper-realistic way. It’s just not that obviously stylized. My good friend Erick Pangilinan (he’s the art director!) describes it as “hyper reality but very balanced in terms of detail. Every camera shot is very directed in terms of gameplay clarity and artistic composition. Following a lighting color script was also key to tie in the mood and story beat.” The textures and lighting and everything else are just so ridiculously pretty, which because of a technique called physical base rendering allows the materials to respond to light properly, making them consistent and realistic (and therefore more awesome).
Let us not forget the amazing view distances, epic scenes, crazy mud/water/everything else type effects. Oh, and the animation, which while not 100% lifelike is about 98% — and therefore about as good as has ever been done. Plus did I mention all the insane shaders and little details. The look of the game, it’s stunning slickness, and jaw-dropping beauty actually makes it more fun to play. Seriously, even the corner of some cave is gorgeous. Frame rate is 30 hertz in Single Player. They couldn’t really squeeze this crazy look into 60 on the PS4. It doesn’t bog much, so gameplay isn’t affected. Sure it would be a little more fluid at 60, but there are a lot of uglier games that run at 30 (or less).
Yeah, that’s what the game looks like
Controls 9.5/10 and core mechanics. I’m a control guy. I programmed most/all of the controls for the Naughty Dog games before Uncharted 1 so I know a little bit about video game control :-). The UC4 controls are great, particularly the climbing controls. Basically, the controls break down into a couple types: Running/jumping/climbing, shooting, hand to hand, and vehicle. I’d say the basic “moving drake around” and climbing controls are 11/10. Some of the new mechanics, like the grappling hook, slides, and piton integrate spectacularly. The way in which Drake reaches for handholds and you can subtly feel them out: perfect. The shooting and “hiding” controls are maybe a 9/10, as is the driving. It all responds well and some elements like the slipping and sliding of the jeep in the mud are crazy good. Occasionally I’d pop out of stealth oddly when trying to shift positions. The hand to hand fighting is more like a 7/10. It’s fine, and the animation is gorgeous, but it doesn’t have the visceral contact quality of say, Bloodborne, where you can confidently fight multiple opponents at the same time. There is an increased emphasis on stealth gameplay, possibly coming over from TLOU. I liked hiding in the grass and quietly taking guys out, and to this UC4 adds pulling and kicking guys off ledges and out of windows. All are quite satisfying when you pull it off.
The fighting / shooting gameplay isn’t immensely varied. There aren’t that many enemy types. Basic mercs, armored mercs, sniper mercs, maybe a few other similar types. This ain’t like Dark Souls III with tons of highly varied fantasy monsters (I love me some fantasy monsters). So enemy variety gets a 3/10. Enemy AI is excellent though.
You can actually slide around in that mud!
Gameplay balance. Naughty Dog describes Uncharted as a “summer blockbuster you play” and this is fairly accurate. It’s a slightly throwback Spielberg-style Indian Jones / National Treasure blockbuster at that. But the actual gameplay is divided between exploring, climbing, puzzle solving, driving, moving along the plot, and a mixed stealth & gun fighting gameplay were you beat up on clusters of mercenaries. The balance between these activities has been slightly adjusted from previous Uncharted games. The driving (boat and jeep) has been added, but the percentage of climbing seems to have been increased and shooting reduced. I really prefer climbing / exploring to fighting in this particular style, so that’s all good by me. Also, it seems that there is more “moving the plot along” stuff, by which I mean relatively trivial things you “do” (like dragging a water bucket down to the puddle to fill it up) that is needed to move along the plot. Interestingly, these tasks, as mundane as they are, do add to the verisimilitude. They almost “feel” like puzzle solving, even though the game usually tells you exactly what to do. That being said, there are half a dozen real puzzles in the game, along the lines of a more complicated Raider‘s map room. You can either “puzzle” them out or google them.
The climbing can really get complicated
It’s also worth noting how this balance is different than in TLOU, which has a lot more stealth, no formal puzzles, and a much less “forgiving” hit and recovery system. TLUO also has collecting materials and crafting useful “tools” like grenades, shivs, healthpacks, etc. and a rudimentary RPG system where you can level up weapons and certain abilities. I really like collecting and “leveling”, and it gives you a reason to explore the gorgeous environments, so one of my biggest “beefs” (in the context of a fabulous game) with UC4 is the scarcity of pickups. Basically, there are the treasures, and these are pretty few and far between and often rather hidden. Naughty Dog deliberately uses this as a differentiation point from TLOU, but I miss collecting. There is also very little weapon progression in Uncharted. You grab what guns are at hand. They all kinda work. I usually take whatever has the most ammo, generally staying away from the grenade launchers and the like. There are some bigger guns toward the end like the RPG and Gatling gun, but they don’t have significant strategic use. Overall, the choice of weapon in Uncharted is far less relevant than it is in TLOU, where the varied characteristics are almost mandatory choices for different encounters. Only on a couple occasions in UC4 do you actually NEED to be using a high impact weapon (shotgun) or a sniper rifle. And there exists no choice of knife, bow etc. All stealth kills are by hand (or foot).
Interestingly, while UC4 still has levels in a dim sort of way, it pretty much eschews the whole boss concept. At most, there is one at the end. And there are big set piece levels like the truck chase, but there even the single boss isn’t exactly like Bloodborne or Dark Souls III‘s 15-20 massive traditional bosses. This isn’t a game about repeatedly dying so you can figure out a difficult series of reactions to lethal moves.
Pirates love puzzles!
Sound 10/10. The sound is just seamlessly there in UC4. There is just a LOT of it, and it just sells this giant adventure as you’d expect. The music is right on style. Don’t underestimate how much work this was.
Nathan likes to be “on time”
Technology 11/10. It’s easy to just say that UC4 is the best looking video game ever, and that the animation and control, and shaders are perfect (given the current state of PS4 tech). They are, but a lot of people had to work really hard to make that happen. And the kind of tech that squeezes that much performance out of the same hunk of hardware that all those other PS4 games run on is impressive — which means impressive programmers. Some Naughty Dog programmer(s) had to code all those cool rope and jeep and mud physics, allow for the ridiculous shader passes, sit there with the artists and work out the luminous shadows and lighting, blend all the different joints, wrangle the data so the load times are barely there, etc etc etc. Most PS4 games have abysmal load times! The power of current machines and engines has sometimes allowed all that vast amount of code to slip onto the perceptual back burner, but I’m sure it’s just as hairy as it was twenty years ago in the Crash Bandicoot era. Which brings up:
Holy Mickey Mouse: Castle of Illusion — gear climbing!
Crash Bandicoot revival. Idea 12/10. Execution 9/10. Just having a bit of Crash in here was so cool and so apropos — particularly given the Indiana Jones nature of Uncharted and obvious reference of the boulder level. It also must have been a helluva lot of work. Crash‘s code and assets are incredibly complicated. I don’t even know if they emulated it or recoded it. I suspect the later as per the 1 point execution ding, which is that the “feel” is just slightly off. The game inside the game looks and sounds pretty much exactly right — except maybe for Crash’s spin which looks a little weird — but the control is just slightly funny. I even went back and popped in the real deal to check. True, this is Crash 1, and Crash 1‘s controls are significantly stiffer and harder than Crash 2 and 3 (where reworked logic and the analog stick vastly improved them), but it still feels just a tiny nitpicky bit different. [ update 6/6/16: Neil Druckmann tells me that one guy recoded the whole sequence (using the original art/sound assets). No wonder it’s just a touch different, but amazingly impressive getting it so close. ]
Multiplayer. I haven’t tried it. Not usually that into death-matches, but that’s just me. I like co-op.
Overall 9.5/10. Uncharted 4 is a spectacular game, and any PS4 owner that doesn’t play it better be the kind that only buys sports games or have a severe allergy to pirates. It’s a solid 20 hours of ridiculously high production value fun. It’s spectacularly polished. It’s the best looking video game yet made. It’s a romping good story and better than most blockbuster movies (which kinda suck these days). It’s just not quite as much a ground breaking masterpiece as TLOU which is the best “story game” made so far. Nor actually to my taste does it offer as much fantasy creeptastic evil challenging monster killing gameplay as equally masterful but less polished Bloodborne. But that last game is far more niche and I’m a dark fantasy lover, so consider me weird. UC4 is like Back to the Future in terms of its mastery: perfect execution and awesome entertainment, just not the deepest thing in the world.
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I guess Nathan had “fear of heights” surgically removed
What would E3 be without a Naughty Dog trailer?
Oh, and there’s another one too, The Last of Us remastered!
There’s a bunch of Naughty Dog news in the air that I thought worth commenting on. First of all, at VGX 2013 Naughty Dog was awarded Studio of the Year! Awesome! Well deserved. Congratulations dogs!
Then, in the flurry of ThanksGavin activities, I must have missed the trailer for the upcoming The Last of Us downloadable pack (Left Behind), which had a bunch of new single player levels. I’m very excited about this even though the trailer is… minimalistic 🙂
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6V0HNNHQK4]And another teaser from the DLC:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1lVLzYER14]And finally, it has been officially announced that Uncharted will be coming to Playstation 4. While this is hardly a surprise, it’s still awesome news and I’m sure — like me — all of you fans can hardly wait.
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The below is an interview I did earlier this year:
I grew up in the simultaneously cosmopolitan and suburban area of Northern Virginia (just outside of Washington D.C.). I was the right age to catch the first big wave of gaming in the late 70s, early 80s. I played all the arcade classics as they came out and eagerly pestered my dad for an Atari 2600. This was a time when there was tremendous experimentation and creativity going on. New video game genres were invented all the time.
In 1980 my science teacher brought into class a Heathkit H8 her husband built. We were given a single mimeographed sheet of paper with the BASIC commands. I read this and then wrote out longhand a draft of a text-based RPG where you wandered around and fought orcs and trolls for gold and tretchure (I could program, but I couldn’t spell). During lunch I typed in and debugged the game, editing my paper copy as needed. It may seem overly ambitious to try and recreate D&D as one’s first program, but you have to make what you love.
This was taken just after Jason & I moved to California in 1994
At the age of twelve, I met Jason Rubin in class (we were both bored and loved games). Seeing as I was a great programmer and Jason a great artist (by middle school standards), an instant partnership was formed. We sold our first professionally in 1985 (at fifteen). This partnership continued all the way through school and beyond. Our company, first called JAM Software, was soon renamed to Naughty Dog (1987). We made and published six games before the original Crash Bandicoot.
Since Crash Bandicoot: Warped, the third title in the franchise and Naughty Dog’s final main instalment in the series, gamers have felt that Crash Bandicoot has lost its magic. As someone who was there at its creation, how do you think the series could be revitalised?
Crash needs a total reboot. There is an opportunity to reset the history and go back to his creation story and the original conflict with Cortex. In that context, one could reprise classic Crash 1 and 2 settings and villains. At a gameplay level, it would make sense to use a more modern free-roaming style, ala Banjo-Kazooie, but with state of the art graphics. There are very few (almost none) true platform games being made today and it’s a shame, as the mechanics were really fun. I would concentrate on Loony Tunes style animation and really addictive action oriented gameplay. That’s what we did with the original Crash and there is no reason it couldn’t be done today — but it would look every bit as good as early Pixar cartoons.
Given the current Crash games, people forget that he was once cool. Our Crash had a certain whimsical edge to him. Sure it was goofy, but it wasn’t dumb. Crash has a deliberate touch of post-modernity, not unlike other cult favorites like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s thematically very different, but the same kind of self-referential meta-cultural quality is there.
What do you make of Crash Bandicoot today? Are you sad that he’s gone from PlayStation Icon to yesterday’s mascot? (Maybe also talk about your opinion of non-Naughty Dog Crash endeavours, did they fail?)
I don’t pay much attention to recent Crash games. For me, He’s like the hot high school girlfriend who put on 50 pounds. I just can’t look.
Post Naughty Dog Crash games fall down not only in being too goofy, but in gameplay and balance. We tried very hard to make every level and every segment of every level evenly paced, addictive, and engaging. Every pile of boxes, every set of enemies, was carefully placed to try and build a rhythmic pulse to the gameplay. Crash was about being frantic, but at the same time relatively free of frustration (although some Crash 1 levels were too hard). There was a lot of layered depth so that you could merely finish the level, or you could try to maximize your performance in terms of collection, speed, or both.
The latest game in the Jak series was the PSP spin-off Daxter in 2006, which was developed by Ready at Dawn. Do you think the Jak series should be resuscitated, or is it best left in the past? (perhaps speak about what it had going for it, how you feel the series progressed in terms of quality, if it needs to be brought back)
There is a lot of opportunity in the Jak franchise as well, but fortunately for the little orange back-talker, Naughty Dog (aka Sony) still owns the rights. Who knows, he might surface again.
What was it about Sony and Playstation that made you feel that it was the perfect brand for Naughty Dog to partner up with? (relationship with Sony over the years, why you felt it wouldn’t harm Naughty Dog’s future)
In 1994 when we started, Sony didn’t have a mascot character. So we set about creating one on the theory that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to slide into that opening. I’m still surprised it worked.
Ultimately the relationship with Sony was a really great partnership. Sony is a quality driven company, and we were a quality driven studio. Naughty Dog products are fully commercial in the spirit of early 80s George Lucas and Steven Spielberg efforts. We believed in mass market pulp that through sheer quality rose above its commercial pulp sentiment. This jived well with Sony’s culture, which was driven to high quality products with the broadest appeal.
In 2004 both Jason Rubin and yourself left Naughty Dog. Considering the company was, and still is, producing high quality games, why did you leave? (perhaps talk about your time at ND, memories of working on certain games, where you think you brought the company, what state you feel you left it at, and where it is now)
This is complex. At the simplest level, when Jason and I sold Naughty Dog to Sony, the deal structured the working relationship for the next four years. Highly unusually, this actually played out according to plan and to the total satisfaction of both parties. We intended to make threes games, and we did: Jak 1, 2, and 3. In addition, by 2004, Jak X and Uncharted were well underway.
As the company grew, Jason and I groomed senior guys who were capable of running the teams. Namely, Evan Wells, Stephen White, and Christophe Balestra. By Jak 3, Evan was the game director anyway, so it was time for them to fly by themselves. And fly they did, as the post Andy & Jason Naughty Dog games are probably even better.
The two biggest Naughty Dog Ips since your leaving would have to be the Uncharted series and the upcoming title The Last of Us. As someone who is now on the outside looking in, how do you view both of these franchises? (Do they keep in line with what you hoped ND would achieve? Do you wish you were still working at ND in order to help develop these kinds of titles?)
Uncharted is in every way a Naughty Dog series. It follows from, and improves upon, the things we were working on with Crash and Jak, taking them to the next level. Evan was an instrumental co-creator of all the Naughty Dog games since Warped, and he was both steeped in and a major contributor to the games from 1998 on. He and the rest of the gang kept heading in the same direction, they just raised the bar on execution even further.
For a long time, Naughty Dog games have been about integrating narrative and gameplay. We wanted to draw people into the world fully and give them a rich story without detracting from a game’s most important quality: fun gameplay. Uncharted took this to the next level with storytelling that’s better than a lot of movies, while retaining intense playability.
Now I’m also really excited for The Last of Us, as apocalypses and teen girls who fight are two of my favorite things (in fiction).
With talk of the PS4 on the horizon, what do you think Naughty Dog is capable of on next-generation systems? (technically, narratively)
I think NDI will just keep taking it to the next level. Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us already look so good it’s hard to imagine where there is to go, but I expect not only will things look even more real, but the machines will have the power to include more and more enemies (or whatnot) on screen. We could see zombie games with a couple hundred zombies (not necessarily from NDI).
Finally, tell us about Flektor and your new passion for writing novels, Andrew. (also, perhaps mention how/if working in the games industry fuelled or influenced your passion for writing)
As a serial creator it was interesting how similar writing a novel was to making a game. Video games and writing are both very iterative and detail oriented. They use a lot of the same mental muscles. My latest novel, Untimed, is about a boy name Charlie, who falls through holes in time. A clockwork man is trying to kill him, but there’s an eighteenth century Scottish girl who can bring him back home – assuming they don’t destroy history by accidentally letting Ben Franklin get killed.
Untimed (http://untimed-novel.com) is very much in the same broad fun spirit that characterized Crash and other Naughty Dog games. I return to one of my favorite mechanics, time travel, which I forced into Crash 3 and Jak 2 (no one complained). Creating the world was very similar to what you do with a game. I had to balance the pros and cons of time travel for my heroes. If your characters are too powerful, there is no jeopardy. So I had to invent all the restrictions and deal with the issues of paradox. In many ways, this is like balancing a video game control set. There are differences of course: games are about fun, and novels are about character and dramatic tension, but the fundamental creative process is similar.
Title: The Last of Us
Genre: Zombie / Survival / 3rd person shooter
Played: June 15-25, 2013
Summary: Masterpiece (even if I weren’t biased)
With The Last of Us, the trajectory Naughty Dog has been pursuing for over a decade reaches for and achieves new heights. This synergy of world building, gameplay integration, emersion, and story telling really began with Jak & Daxter. True, with Crash Bandicoot, we made inroads in all but the last (anyone remember the “Crash, can you find my battery?” plot of Crash 2?). Crash focused on integrating addictive gameplay with a consistent, coherent, and lavishly produced setting (I’ll include character in this setting), but it didn’t have any true story or drama.
The Jak franchise introduced a more elaborate narrative and characters with more complexity, particularly in Jak 2 where we started integrating the cinematic segments in a more interwoven fashion. The Uncharted franchise took this to new levels, essentially becoming Indiana Jones type movies that you played, but TLOU climbs yet another step further, delivering characters you care about , true drama, and intense cinematic language while preserving a completely coherent style and intense gameplay. Everything about the game serves to reinforce the overall tone: the pathos of two people trying to heal in the face of great horror.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpdSVF_k_w]The art design is fabulous. Again, even though the Art Director (Erick Pangilinan) is one of my best friends (obviously biasing me) this is objectively true. It’s certainly one of the best looking games to date. There is a deliberate choice to heavily light — stylistically overlight — the entire game. While there exist some dark underground parts, for the most part, the lighting is luminous. Intense white light (think Minority Report) starkly bathes this ruined vision of America. No gloriously decayed texture is left hidden. Closeups of characters show every stain and frayed thread in clothes worn for months (perhaps years?). This is a world of contrast. Lush greenery has reclaimed much of the urban landscape, yet crumbled concrete, rusted steel, and burned out cars litter the scenery. As do sordid blood stains and desiccated corpses. There is a sense here of great violence, and desperation, much of it in the past. Little details abound. Shrines to dead loved ones. A tiny grave marked with a teddy bear. Family photos. Rarely does it look cloned or stamped (although that door with the weird seal is everywhere) . Nor, despite a strong and coherent visual style, is it repetitive. As we move from the Northeast to the Heartland to the Mountains the scenery — and even the seasons — keep changing. Weather is used to great effect. The rain in early Boston sequences is stunning, as is the chilling lakeside blizzard late in the game’s second act.
The view took my breath away
The minimalist string music compounds the game’s haunting atmosphere. While the game is full of detail, it’s in the broad sense, fairly stark — as the bulk of the scenery is ruined and deserted. This lends the whole world a quality of emptiness reinforced by the matching sonic starkness. The sound effects are harsh and solidly naturalistic, emphasizing both the natural (bird noises) and the discordant tone of decayed materials (like rusted garage doors opening). To this background soundscape is added the grim punctuation of the combat sounds. Every grunt, sneaker squeak, bolt action, and gurgling last breath is vividly apparent.
There is a minimalism to the interface that fits with the overall tone. The title screen is a single frozen camera shot of a window. The menus are barely styled and contain only exactly what they need. The art is simple and iconic. Not only does this work from a stylistic point of view, enhancing the serious tone of the game, but the controls are direct and to the point, easy to use, preventing you from getting distracted by mechanics. With TLOU, it’s the story and characters that matter, not the mechanics of saving a game. Many elements traditional in modern titles are toned down or absent. Achievements? Not part of this world. Secret collectables? The game has them — in the form of Firefly pendants — but they are understated mementos of the dead, not the bombastic collectables typical of the genre.
Minimalist interface
Technically the engine steps out of the limelight and just delivers — and delivers in spades. Bugs are minor and few and far between. I never crashed or got stuck. There are some frame rate problems in the biggest and widest of shots (and they do look gorgeous) or sometimes with the flashlight or “hearing mode,” but this never hurts the gameplay. I noticed a couple extremely minor graphical glitches. Mostly stuff just works, often combining multiple disciplines in classic Naughty Dog brilliance. The animation, particularly in interaction with the backgrounds and other characters, is a triumph of both art and programming. It’s perhaps the slickest, most lifelike, ever used in a game. The AI is first rate. The environments feel wide open and vast, and they have a certain non linearity, yet because of the nature of the game you must be contained, and it’s done very artfully. Rubble fills stairwells, broken down vehicles block alleys, collapsed bridges deter overzealous exploration. So much of what makes this game look so great is the amazing synergy between art and tech. The rain, the water, the snow, the glowing light effects, the realistic shadowing and flashlight. It’s all solidly in both realms.
Hunger games much?
Different elements of the gameplay work well together. The game’s phenomenal pacing is made up of story cuts, intense combat, sneaking, and scavenging. This last, which is surprisingly satisfying, is sometimes done in the heat of battle — or at least when hiding from deadly foes and desperately looking to bolster ones supplies — and sometimes an end all onto itself. These quieter moments, after a brace of nasties are defeated, or in an abandoned section of city, are welcome relief. The game rarely has enemies sneak up on you once a section has been identified as safe, so these provide a nice break in the tension. The crafting itself is simple. There are a 4-5 resources and similar construction costs for pairs of items. Healthpacks and molotov cocktails share resources, as do shivs and weapon enhancements. Everything is in short supply and desperately useful. Pills can be used to upgrade your character, but you must chose in which manner. Spare parts upgrade guns and the like. The weapons are nicely differentiated, each with it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and they get noticeably better when upgraded. The shortage of ammo always prevents any weapon from being overpowering. Even the assault riffle, gained in the last level, isn’t too fearsome against your body armored opponents.
I dare you to put one of these in your bedroom
Let’s discuss the gameplay. Technically TLOU is a 3rd person shooter, but it makes a number of stylistic alterations in service of mood that completely alter the feel. This isn’t your typical shooter where ammunition is plentiful, the character sponges up bullets, and healing is easy. You can only survive a handful of hits. The arrival of more than 2-3 mobs in close proximity is a near certain recipe for death. The healthpacks (potions) take some time to apply and are in short supply. Joel and Ellie do a lot of creeping around in the shadows. The key here is to avoid agroing too many mobs, and when you do, to lose them by getting out of the way. A number of mechanics serve this end.
There are a lot of shadows. Counters and obstacles are conveniently crouching height (this rarely looks forced). You can creep around fairly rapidly. Humans can see and often probe the darkness with flashlights. The infected are generally blind (or crazy) and so are easier to sneak up on — but clickers and bloaters are tough and can kill you in one bite. Joel (and Ellie) have quite the sense of hearing and can “hear” through nearby walls to spot the outlines of enemies. This is a little gamey, and the mobs apparently can’t do it, but in practice works quite well. One of the most effective strategies, particularly with the infected, is to stay in stealth at all costs. There are a couple of ways to kill silently (more or less). Humans and runners can be strangled or knifed (which wears out your blades but is quicker). The bow can be used to silently kill most opponents at a distance and if you’re lucky, you won’t break your arrows. Overall it is deeply fulfilling to wipe out a whole crew without them ever seeing you. This often requires replaying the section several times to learn the layout and careful looting of every possible supply.
Speaking of which, the looting, scavenging, and crafting mechanic is awesome. Everything is so scarce, ammo so valuable, and everything you craft so useful that a few items easily make the difference between life and death. It’s also extremely satisfying to evade some opponents, sneak around, craft an extra shiv or health pack and then kill them. You can augment the melee weapons to make them kill faster (very useful as while melee is satisfying, should a second or third mob show up while you are pummeling someone, it’s bad news). You can build shivs (essential for fast silent kills, surviving clickers, opening secret doors) or healthpacks or a number of bombs. The bombs come in three types. Molotovs, nailbombs, and smokebombs. Each have their use. The fire is great against infected. The nailbombs can be thrown OR left around as mines. I didn’t appreciate the smokebombs until near the end of the game, but they create a kind of dead zone that the human mobs won’t fire into and which can be used to kill them. Used sequentially and in tandem with the flame thrower they make a lethal combination.
Moments like these are genuinely touching
I have a few quibbles. The aiming can be difficult at times, particularly until you upgrade “weapon shake.” It’s few hard to land a head shot (or even sometimes a shot) before someone shoots you. When opponents are behind you or off to the side it can be frustrating to try to turn and strike them. There is some kind of quick turn around move. I didn’t master it (but should have). Some sections with lots of enemies are quite hard. There appears to be at least a bit of DDA (Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment) to help you get by if you die a lot in one spot. Actually fighting bloaters and particularly bloaters together with clickers can be VERY hard.
I’m betting TLOU required A LOT of tuning to reach its current fun factor, as it would be easy for gameplay involving so much hiding, creeping, and dying to be boring — but the elements combine to make it really fun. After the first chapter I learned to become methodical and search every corner for loot. Instead of being tedious, this served as a break from the tension and turned out to be incredibly satisfying. The melee is extremely graphic with a good amount of variety. It’s quite creepy hearing a guard gurgle as you strangle him or slamming an infected in the neck with a baseball bat “augmented” with taped on scissors. Everything serves the horrifying mood.
Uh oh!
And mood is one of the game’s greatest strengths. TLOU draws from nearly every post apocalyptic source and builds trope after trope into a satisfying, coherent, and perhaps more realistic whole. It’s prettier and less hopeless than The Road — and considerably more believable. No film could ever offer this scope. The sets (or CGI) would be far too expensive, the cast too enormous. Yet TLOU also strives to compete with film in terms of emotional engagement and character development. I’d argue it succeeds.
The longer form (it took me 18 hours to play through on normal difficulty) helps with the character part. I’m becoming of the increasing opinion that film is actually an unsatisfying format — offering far too little depth, particularly in this day and age when the 2-3 hours are mostly consumed by overlong effects driven fights. Some of TLOU’s vignettes should come off as forced, as they are drawn directly from tropes and fairly straightforward. One that comes to mind is when the hunter humvee murders two innocents while a hiding Joel and Ellie watch. However, in the context of the game and characters it was surprisingly effective. TLOU is a clear case where the whole transcends the sum of the parts. And hell, a lot of the parts are pretty damn good.
Can we say creepy?
Neil Druckmann (who I hired as a promising intern programmer a whole career ago) turns out an emotional script. Again, it draws extremely heavily from tropes. Everything any post apocalyptic survival story has ever had is here: hunters, cannibals, resistance leaders, a cure, friends who turn (into zombies), reversals, quarantine zones, etc. But in moments little and big the relationship between Joel and Ellie builds — so much so that the little downtime conversations are real gems. By the time the Pittsburg chapter concludes, Ellie becomes in your head someone really worth fighting for — and the remainder of the game — wow, it really delivers. I often feel (reading or watching) that the second half lets me down. Good as the first half of TLOU is, the second is several times better.
Really notable for me was the entire “winter” sequence. Coming out of a really emotional turn in Colorado TLOU employs cinematic language and plotting in a highly effective way. So much do we care for the characters, and so pretty is the game, that it manages to make 10 minutes of trudging through the snow exhilarating! And that’s only the beginning. I really liked the way the game cut back and forth between playable Joel and Ellie as it told the story from both perspectives. Although, I have a slight nitpick with the “arc” of the section villain, who starts out with some complexity and sympathy and turns monster without too much explanation. But such is the momentum of this story that it sails right over speed-bumps like this.
So basically, if you care about video games at all, play The Last of Us.
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My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo) has bought us an extensive new gameplay coverage video for Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic survival game, The Last of Us. Aside from the recently released Diablo III, this is my most anticipated upcoming game, and I suspect I’m not alone.
A couple of weeks ago I went back to Naughty Dog to do some interviews for the Jak & Daxter Collection, which releases tomorrow (February 7). And of course you should go buy this right away, only one click AFTER you buy my novel, The Darkening Dream. But my thoughts about the visit have been logged on the Naughty Dog blog:
While I’m still good friends with many Naughty Dogs and frequently see them socially, it’s been a couple years since I was in the office itself – and this was my first time in the new gigantic Watergarden 2.0 space.
Wow! My baby is all grown up and popped out a helluva pack of rugrats. When I left, the office was 25,000 sq/feet and we had about 80 people – which at the time, seemed enormous enough – now it’s over twice that big with more than twice the folks. From the walls hang giant murals of Naughty Dog masterpieces. It’s enough to make you feel small…
You can find the full post here!
I also got the chance to catch up with all my friends, virtual and real.
Pack leaders old and new! Left to right Christophe, me, Jason, and Evan.
Storytelling, the old fashioned way
Modern man has a wide variety of “pure” storytelling mediums, like film, long form television, and novels. While these have some very significant differences they all share the same basic focus on plot and character. Typically at least, good stories introduce a character with problems, get you to like them, then chronicle the struggle as they are compelled to change and adapt to overcome these problems. In the end, they either do so, or are defeated to teach us a lesson (a variant we call tragedy).
These elements: character, plot, and transformational arc, are completely central to the normal story (I deliberately ignore weird experimental storytelling). Really, they are the core of what makes a good film or novel.
Roman mosaic showing comedy (right) and tragedy (left)
But with a game, this whole business is secondary. The primary focus of a game is fun. And fun through gameplay. Does Tetris have any character or plot? Did even Doom? No. But they were fun games. Really fun.
Games such as Naughty Dog’s Jak & Daxter or Uncharted strive to bridge these gaps by offering both. This is very difficult because they don’t really serve each other.
The gameplay in Uncharted 2, for example, has three primary modes: survival gunplay, platforming, and puzzle solving. The player must assess the layout of the level, learn it, and navigate it without getting killed. This involves anticipating the enemies and taking them out first. You use the weapons at your disposal, the mechanics, and the terrain provided to do so. With platforming you need to come to understand what the character can do physical, find your way, and successfully traverse the route.
Some games do focus on story
When these are done well, when the design is varied, the levels pretty, the enemies cool, and the challenges measured, challenging and above all, doable – it’s fun. Uncharted 2 is such a game.
It also has a pretty darn good story which is woven in with the design of the levels and the challenges. This adds to the whole thing. Watching the next segment of story becomes part of your reward for finishing a segment. There is a tremendous level of art that goes into getting both of these to work at the same time, but certainly each is constrained at times by the needs of the other.
Content in games is expensive and difficult to make. Therefore it needs to repeat. You really do need to shoot the same enemy hundreds of times. Otherwise the enemy isn’t providing enough mileage to justify the labor involved to create him. The player is also in control and therefore the consequences of his play affect success or failure.
My first novel
But in storytelling, success and failure are the carefully monitored heartbeat of any good story. You bring the protagonist up, dash him down, grind him into the ground, lift him up, slam him sideways. I knew this intuitively when writing my first novel, The Darkening Dream. I’ve read so many books and watched so many films and shows that it seemed “obvious.” But at the same time, it turned out to be far from easy. Writing a good story has less constraints than making a good game, but it’s still extremely difficult. You need to be constantly balancing the issues of character, motivation, the logic of the plot, and the need to seesaw the dramatic tension. In the end stylistic concerns sometimes overwhelm dramatic ones (to the reader’s detriment).
In a game, it’s even more complicated, and there is barely a chance of hitting all the right dramatic notes. The player has a lot to say about this natural up and down pacing, so the story-based game tries to separate how well you are really doing from the actual plot. Usually death or failure in the game causes the player to merely repeat some segment of the game (and hence the story), when they finish the level and get the next segment of storytelling, they’ll get it regardless of whether they died once or 100 times. The better player merely proceeds faster.
This is different, but even more problematic in a less linear game such as World of Warcraft. There, the mechanics of the game heavily distort the conceits of storytelling. The story is even broadly linked to the chronological evolution of the game in real time. For example, in December of 2009 Blizzard released the Icecrown Citadel patch of Wrath of the Lich King, making it possible for players to finally reach and confront the ultimate boss of the expansion (the titular Lich King). But the fact is, in order to properly maintain the reward mechanics of endgame raiding, each character was and often did, progress through this segment of the story once, or even twice a week.
The Lich King
Now, two years later, the Lich King has been defeated, the world of Azeroth has been broken, yet it’s still possible to go back to Icecrown and take on Arthas again. And again. Ditto for any of the several hundred even older bosses. Players accept that they have random access to a long and convoluted story. In fact, the need to generate so much gameplay in WOW has created a body of lore that gives the Silmarillion a run for its money. But the way in which it’s experienced mutes the emotional intensity.
What really provides the excitement in WOW (and many other games), isn’t the question of whether the dragon queen Onyxia lives or dies, but the – shall we dare say – drama of whether she does tonight, for us, the group fighting her. And more importantly, will she drop the Nemesis skullcap (arbitrary cool piece of loot) one has been trying to get for six months.
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My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed |
Naughty Dog, the company I founded, has just released the trailer for their new game — and new franchise! This is the first new series since Uncharted launched in 2007. I have to say the new one looks totally awesome because it’s well — post apocalyptic zombie (which I love) — and in true Naughty Dog fashion totally gorgeous. Plus I love spunky heroines. This one, seemingly, but not actually voiced by actress Ellen Page of Juno fame* is totally cute, in a kind of jailbait sort of way.
I can totally see how the kind of intimate hand to hand and gunplay mechanics that Naughty Dog has been perfecting with Nathan Drake would adapt perfectly to this sort of The Road meets Juno world.
So I’m even more excited than I was for Uncharted 3, which is saying a lot!
*NOTE: According to this website, the leads are Miss Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, as given by tweet from someone at Naughty Dog. And @Neil_Druckmann, my friend and the lead designer confirmed via twitter too, so it’s accurate.
Reviews have started pouring in for Naughty Dog’s latest masterpiece, Uncharted 3. Given that this is the sequel to Uncharted 2, the multiple game of the year hit of 2009, one might’ve worried that there was nowhere to go but down. But not so for the unstoppable team at Naughty Dog. Check out the scores below pouring! IGN’s reviewer even goes so far as to call it his “new favorite game of all time!” Now, I can take no credit for any of the hard work the amazing team has put into the entire series, but I will stake a small claim to having brought the company up with an attitude of quality, quality, quality = consumer first = fun! Congratulations guys for keeping the torch burning brighter and brighter.
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