“The Last of Us” is the IP of the famous American game studio “Naughty Dog”.
The early history of “Naughty Dog” studio is long, and it has achieved great success by relying on “Crash Bandicoot” series of casual games.
Shortly after being acquired by Sony, several of the studio’s early founders left the company and, led by two newcomers, transformed the studio to make cinematic expressive games that were good at storytelling.
“Uncharted”, the first masterpiece of Naughty Dog Studio, became a hit as soon as it was launched. Strictly speaking, “Uncharted” is a mixed type of game, which combines various elements such as adventure, puzzle solving, action, third-person shooting, and movie-level narrative, but it combines various elements organically, providing players with an integrated and one-size-fits-all story of exotic adventure.
I still remember clearly that when I first played “Uncharted”, I was as amazed to see the performance of the game as close to the movie as when I first played “God of War”. At that time, I had a complete admiration for Sony, which could continuously produce such masterpieces, because this work had nothing to do with the “Crash Bandicoot” series that Naughty Dog was good at before.
At one point, I even thought they were so successful with the help of studios such as Columbia and MGM, which are owned by Sony.
In fact, they are still a relatively independent game company, just employing a lot of experts from the film industry.
Relying on the successful sequels of “Uncharted”, “Naughty Dog” continues to hone their technical and plot design skills, the production is getting better and better, and the media rating is getting higher and higher. The cumulative sales of the whole series exceeded 40 million sets, earning more than $2 billion for Sony, and effectively boosted the sales of two generations of PS3 and PS4 game consoles.
After the success of the “Uncharted” series, “Naughty Dog” began to focus on their core strengths in the direction of film-level narrative, launching a new work “The Last of Us”, which received full marks from all major media as soon as it was launched, and its cumulative sales have exceeded 20 million units.
We summarize the core elements of its success:
First, the core play experience is more focused on the plot.
Compared to “Uncharted”, “The Last of Us” deliberately reduces the proportion of battle and puzzle elements in the game, and sets the shots more compact, making players feel more consistent with their characters, making them feel closer to the character, better understanding of the way the character behaves, and resulting in stronger empathy.
As a more focused interactive film game, these are its efforts in the direction of the core “sense of substitution” of this category of games, so that the game can be more focused on the plot flow and provide players with a more holistic and coherent experience. thus promoting the success of the game.
Second, the picture is closer to the fidelity of the film.
Although the picture of “The Last of Us” is not as amazing as that of God of War3 (it gives a stunning visual impact or strong shock effect as soon as it comes up), the content of the picture created by “The Last of Us” is more prominent in various details of the virtual environment, including the slight shaking of the character’s limbs, wet clothes and clothes sticking to the body, the wriggling of weeds when they are wading, the sudden passing of small animals, and so on.
It’s realistic.
According to the arrangement of the main plot, the game traverses the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and each season has a corresponding hue-the gloom of autumn, the harshness of winter, the vitality of spring, and even echo with the plot and the mood of the protagonist.
Third, successful plot design.
The plot setting of “The Last of Us” is much more delicate than that of “Uncharted”. It uses more techniques to depict the psychology of the characters in the film, such as a large number of close-up shots, so that when players manipulate the actions of the protagonists, they no longer kill for the sake of killing, to survive, to save, but to experience the true feelings of the protagonists at that time.
He can even feel his inner entanglement and pain, which is full of praise, torture and reflection on human nature that the creator hopes to reflect in the plot.
For example, at the beginning of the game, the protagonist Joel is closed because of the loss of his daughter, and then he gradually projects his feelings for his daughter onto Ellie, a little girl who is not related to him.
And Ellie’s feelings for Joel after a series of adventures, produce a stronger and stronger father-daughter relationship, these changes let players empathize, thoroughly immersed in them, everything is so reasonable.
And the best part is at the end, Joel has to make a choice: choose his goal of studying the vaccine all the way, save the entire human race, or save the little girl Ellie from the firefly base?
In the end, she chose the latter, gave up the human race, and rescued Ellie.
Does such a choice make people feel abrupt?
No, because what the game creators want to transmit to players is a higher, universal idea: vaccines can only save lives, but not human nature, and giving up human nature is really giving up hope.
It is not the virus that causes the apocalypse, but the human fear of the virus.
If Joel had given up on Ellie, it would have been the end of mankind.
In the end, we can see that the town led by his old friend Tommy is growing day by day. I believe that this spirit full of unity, fraternity and enterprising spirit is the real hope of mankind.