Naughty Dog has revealed that double Oscar-winner Gustavo Santaolalla is composing the music for upcoming PS3-exclusive The Last Of Us.
The news came during a presentation at the studio's Santa Monica HQ on Monday, where the full version of the game's main theme - a section of which features at the end of the reveal trailer - was played to press.
"He's awesome," said Neil Druckmann, creative director and writer on The Last Of Us. "He picks and chooses what he works on; he could work on all these big movies. We brought him in here, showed him the game, walked him through the whole story and what we're trying to do, and he said 'I want to be a part of this'."
The Argentine composer won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Score for his work on Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Babel (2006).
The main theme is acoustic guitar-led, an arpeggiated figure in a minor key over tribal percussion, building to a dissonant climax of fiercely-strummed chords.
"With this music we're trying to get emotion. We're not going for horror," Druckmann explained.
"There's going to be horrific things happening in this game, but that's not the focus of it. The monsters aren't the focus of it, it's the relationship between Joel and Ellie."
If they've got an Oscar-winning composer working with them, I think it's clear they've got, or are at least going for, one heck of an emotional story here. I think they'll be able to capture the emotion seen in the Dead Island trailer. I'm excited.
I have no idea what to expect from the gameplay though. but if it's a third-person shooter, it looks like we might be fighting fast "zombies"/enemies in this game . Those are never fun
Reports are coming in that this game have been in development for the past two years...
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Finally, the UK page suggests "no network play," which could mean the final game is a local-only affair. Of course, that could change in the lead-up to launch in 2012.
I absolutely wouldn't have any problems with this. If more resources can be put into the storyline/SP aspect instead of having to figure out how to incorporate an online/multiplayer scenario, I'll definitey day-one purchase on this. I really enjoyed Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire much more because of this. But I'm more of an offline player anyways, so...
eu.playstation.com's pretty unreliable with software specs and ND/SCEA seem to be controlling information pretty tightly so the announcement and details could come later like Uncharted 2.
According to USA Today, it's apparently been confirmed that The Last of Us will be third-person (no surprise there).
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Originally Posted by USA Today
Like the Uncharted games, The Last of Us has a third-person perspective, in which you see the character on-screen, but it has a more realistic, cinematic look. "We're trying to move the medium of video games into an area elevated in the same manner of respect of film," Balestra says. "We want to redefine what our medium is even called. 'Video game' is not an accurate name anymore. It is not necessarily a game with rules and a winner and a loser. It's an experience."
I've watched the trailer countless times and I still get the urge to watch it again.
same
Naughty Dog wants to "change the f***ing industry" with The Last of Us
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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."
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"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."
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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."
And yet, defying the odds, news of two-years-in-the-making The Last of Us, created by an 80-strong Naughty Dog team no-one knew existed, was met with that rarest of emotions when it broke cover at the weekend: genuine surprise. But, oh, how close it all came to unravelling as the big day approached.
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Major artistic inspirations, meanwhile, include the movies No Country For Old Men and The Road, comic The Walking Dead and WWII novel City of Thieves.
Contrary to evidence in the trailer, however, The Last of Us is "not a zombie game," insists Staley. Druckmann explains: "If the game was about the monsters, we would have not showed them. The story's not about them, so [we thought] let's get it out of the way."
Instead, he wants us to consider the relationship between its two lead characters. Joel is a survivor and anti-hero (played by Troy Baker), and Ellie is a 14 year-old girl (played by 28 year-old Ashley Johnson) with no memory of the world pre-apocalypse.
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The game will play out across various US cities and it's suggested that survival will involve both killing and scavenging. Do you control Joel alone? Ellie? Both? Is it co-op? Naughty Dog isn't saying.
"It's story-driven, [but] the whole triangle is story, gameplay and art," says Staley. "As a gamer it's all about strategy and giving the player enough tools in their toolkit so that they can come upon something and choose and have the consequences play out within their choices."
How those choices play out remains unclear, but don't expect any kind of Heavy Rain-esque branching narrative. "We're telling it the way we've been developing this method at Naughty Dog," explains Druckmann. "We're evolving it, but I can't say anymore."
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With that in mind, imagine the shockwaves that reverberated around the Naughty Dog office when they saw that Dead Island trailer.
"We saw it and we thought, wait a minute, someone else is doing this - it's really moving, there's this family that's been torn apart," says Druckmann. But, as we now know, it bore little relation to the finished article.
"You saw the game and it wasn't that," he adds. "I'm not saying whether it was a good or bad game, but it wasn't that. And we feel our trailer is very representative of what we're going for." Not least because the footage is all in-engine.
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So if not a horror game, what is it? "This is going to sound corny and it might not appeal to gamers, but I would say it's a love story," he says. "It's not a romantic love story, it's a love story about a father-daughter-like relationship."
This was in part influenced by the memorable sequence between Nathan Drake and Tenzin, his Tibetan guide, in Uncharted 2. "We kept joking, wouldn't it be intriguing to develop a whole game where you're building this relationship, not just a level," he says.
Ugh, please don't remind me of the "adaptation" of my favorite vampire novel. Hopefully the Last of Us is better than that. You're right, though, there are quite a few movies similar to TLOS already. The dynamic between the characters reminds me a bit of Bioshock Infinite.
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