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Neil talks about the violence in the trailer, about the AI, and more.
The main talking point to me is the violence - Neil sheds some light on it:
Great insight to why they decided to go with this direction and I fully support it.
Neil talks about the violence in the trailer, about the AI, and more.
The main talking point to me is the violence - Neil sheds some light on it:
The demo was very violent, as was the game's trailer at Paris Games Weeklate last year. It's made some critics recoil. I asked Druckmann if he'd heard that feedback and what he made of it.
"We're making a game about the cycle of violence and we're making a statement about violent actions and the impact they have on the character that's committing them and on the people close to them," he said. "And our whole approach is to say, 'We want to treat this as realistically as possible.' When you stab someone—if you watch reference videos, which we have, it's gross and it's messy and it's not sanitized like you see in most movies and games. And we wanted to get the player to feel that."
The idea, he underscored, was "for the player to feel repulsed by some of the violence they are committing themselves. It felt like that is the most honest way to tell this story."
One person's video game violence is another person's video game fun. For better and at times for worse, the very essence of fun interaction in video games has deep roots in violent interaction, from the primitive days of one batch of pixels causing another to blink out of existence to modern times, when blinking an enemy out of existence often involves a gory finishing move.
Fun in video games, I suggested to Druckmann, often goes hand in hand with virtual violence. "This might be a semantic argument," he replied, "But we don't use the word 'fun' with The Last Of Us. We say 'engaging.' It needs to be engaging. If the stakes are real, if you are invested in the character and their relationship, you're going to go through and commit these actions that might—and should be—at times making you feel uncomfortable to progress in the story, to see what's happened to the character and at times to struggle with their motivation versus your moral line.
"The kind of stories we tell, with strong specific characters, we like that at times you're not in line with the character. It kind of makes you question philosophically: where do I stand on these things? And that was a big part of the first game and a lot of the stuff we learned from the first game we're applying to this game."
Great insight to why they decided to go with this direction and I fully support it.