"Let's give them lots of player freedom this time!"

Play testers continually don't look at a set piece vista the developers and artists spent 400 hours creating.

"Well, that's enough of that. Back to the rails."

Alright, can't really get hyped without anything else to go on.

I was pretty fine with the way Last of Us 1 and 2 were handled, did a pretty good job at telling a story, without making it feeling like a linear corridor game. More freedom in a similar type of game would be nice, but generally it just seems to mean more downtime traveling between objectives occasionally interrupted by random encounters. If that is what they mean with more freedom, and not something else like character creation or branching storylines or whatever.

Reading the article, he refers to Elden Ring. I personally hate that kind of story telling though. I know a lot of people are absolutely lyrical about the game, but that's probably more thanks to the gameplay. The story in that game is just being dripfed without much context and they are being intentionally vague about so many things. It's more like a passive way of revealing little bits of the world without ever fully explaining anything.

Expecting an empty, repetitive open world game. Hoping to be wrong.

Naughty Dog did some solid storytelling in TLoU. It would be great if they could figure out how to apply that well to a game that isn't on rails.

“I think some of the best storytelling in The Last of Us – yes, a lot of it is in the cinematics – but a lot of it is in the gameplay, and moving around a space, and understanding a history of a space by just looking at it and examining it.

I do appreciate this in game worlds, although this alone is not a substitute for storytelling, and not enough to make an open world fun. The world has to be interesting and diverse, full of unique things, characters, places, and situations to discover, so players will want to spend their time exploring it. Evidence of the world's history is great for adding background depth, but I'll be bored quickly if that's all there is.

Here's hoping Naughty Dog makes something brilliant in this genre that they aren't known for (have they ever done an open world?) rather than repeating the mistake other studios have made by churning out another open world of monotony.

The freedom to make a PNS account maybe?

Players: Can we have more co-op with a sturdy storyline, and maybe offline play?

Game Developers: lol fam 💀

News news news, it may also be using a game controller to translate user input into character actions.

Will it be fun though?

lust of ass 3