Why The Last of Us is the opposite of Uncharted

[Administrator]

If there has been a theme over the past couple of E3s, then perhaps it has been the rush to condemn triple-A game developers for taking the easy route. Consider Ryse, for example - or Saving Private Ryse, as Steven Spielberg's lawyers might have described it, watching the Son of Rome fall sideways during a beach landing and observe his brothers blown to pieces with ringing in his ears. As Rich Stanton put it, "you can tell exactly what this plays like by just looking at it". Playing through The Last of Us, however, is a reminder that sometimes you can't, even when it seems like you really can.
At first glance, The Last of Us seems like another safe bet. Players will cross a post-apocalyptic American landscape (I would say "stop me if this sounds familiar", but then nobody in the world would get beyond this paragraph), fighting zombies as they go, scavenging for weapons and supplies and reading dead people's diaries as they stitch together the details of what's happened to their country. Naughty Dog is one of the most technically proficient of the studios known for delivering worlds like this, but after a series about a quippy explorer who raids caves for mythological treasure (stop me if this - oh forget it) it hardly sounds like they're stretching themselves.
But the truth is that The Last of Us is almost the complete opposite of its stable-mate, the Uncharted series. Those games often put spectacle in front of everything - the developers speak of sections like the train level in Uncharted 2 and the overturning ship in Uncharted 3 with an almost religious fervour, the technical accomplishment pushing everything else into the background. Nathan Drake's story and the current McGuffin and bad guys are great, sure, but mainly in the context of their peerless performance capture. Uncharted 3 was the series' nadir for me in this sense, blinded to terrible gameplay problems (can we talk about them yet, or are we saving that for the Uncharted 4 preview presentations?) and incoherency by the blinkers of its technical sophistication.
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