Before The Last of Us, “nobody” was making games like it, according to its game director – although that’s definitely not the case anymore.
Speaking to OPM way back in 2012, before the original release of The Last of Us, game director Bruce Straley explained how Naughty Dog arrived at what would become its magnum opus. “It pretty much fell in our laps, that no one else is doing character-driven survival action games,” he says. “That’s really what it came down to. And we love that genre – we love playing it, we love watching it, we’re influenced by it.”
The goal in the early 2010s, Straley says, was to find out “if we can do what we do with Uncharted with this other genre – nobody’s doing that.” Neil Druckmann – now studio head at Naughty Dog and previously writer and creative director on The Last of Us – explains that “when you look at film, or comics, or any other medium that deals with this content, it’s all about the characters. It’s all about the pressures of the world forcing them to make really difficult decisions, and you learn something about who we are as human beings.”
According to Straley and Druckmann, that’s something that games weren’t really pushing. Clearly, the Resident Evil series had existed for a long time before Ellie and Joel got on the scene, but Druckmann argues “no one [was] approaching it from the character side. It’s all campy, over-the-top violence.”
Whether or not you agree with the idea that Naughty Dog was doing something entirely new, what’s undeniable is that the impact The Last of Us had means it’s certainly not the case that this is an underused genre. The Plague Tale and Dying Light series, as well as Days Gone, both certainly pay attention to character within their apocalyptic worlds.
Elsewhere, the new Tomb Raider trilogy, as well as God of War and Ragnarok, borrow heavily from Naughty Dog’s design. And ironically, the Resident Evil remakes certainly seem to have learned some lessons from the games they originally inspired.