How The Last Of Us Part 2 Is Changing The Face Of Video Game Story Telling
If anyone wanted to find evidence to show that the games industry is ‘growing up’ then Naughty Dog should be brought forward and The Last Of Us Part II be the first title submitted. Read on to find out why we think The Last Of Us Part 2 is changing the face of video game story telling.
Flying back to the dawn of video games, the alien concept of moving a representative icon across a TV screen to achieve a goal had to be offset by making the representation as pure and simple as possible – a line stood in for a ping-pong paddle, a handful of vector lines showed a rocket firing a glowing dot at another handful of lines portraying a rock and an 8×8 arrangement of yellow and black pixels made a circular-pill-hungry hero.
Simple as these on-screen avatars may be, there was something about the fact that YOU were controlling this character in a world that seemed to genuinely exist on that cathode ray tube that you fully invested in that world and actually cared what happened there. If the square got past your line-paddle in Pong then you had really missed that genuine ping-pong ball, if that hollow, white vector rock hit your rudimentary triangle space fighter then you’d die in the vacuum of space, and if a bright, cartoon ghost managed to catch Pac-Man, well the horrible spectral death didn’t bear thinking about.
Some old, same new
Skimming forward through the video game decades, hopping across multiple hardware generations, audio-visual fidelity has dramatically increased and game world complexity has developed to a dizzyingly sophisticated level to make games more immersive and enjoyable than ever. Push a little deeper into those virtual worlds however, and you usually find that the representations of characters and their motivations are generally as two-dimensional as Inky, Blinky, Pinky and – dare I say it – Clyde.
Hyper-realistic warfare shooters may attach names and army unit designations to their first person characters, but there’s rarely any more depth than Doom’s anonymous ‘Grunt’ – leaving the player to project whoever they like onto what is to all intents and purposes a player in a multiplayer electronic sport. Those that do attempt to add a bit of background generally fall back on archetypes taken from genre fiction. In most cases it’s pretty easy to plot a direct line from a game character to a sci-fi, fantasy or action hero in established genre movies or TV shows.
With feeling
Amid the sea of traditional storytelling trends in games like this, you can find glimmers of narrative originality if you look. Starbreeze’s Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons – an early PS4 title – uses a two-stick control system to move sibling characters around and although this seems a simple gameplay mechanic, the feeling of loss that this portrays later in the game is palpable.
This kind of exploration into storytelling is often restricted to indie studios, producing experiences somewhat more free of the commercial pressures of big studio titles. Among the bigger development names, the one place that stands out from the rest of this field in this arena is Naughty Dog.
When Naughty Dog released Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, there was an easily-perceptible shift in the way game characters were portrayed. The developers clearly decided that if you were going to bother having high-detail on-screen characters reciting lines with actual voices, then why the hell not make it dialog that is believable, well-acted and engaging?
With the Uncharted series collecting well-deserved awards – including a BAFTA for storytelling – Naughty Dog then applied this philosophy to another tale set in an altogether darker and more serious game world. Naughty Dog took another well-trodden genre path, survival horror, to create the genre-conquering The Last Of Us.
Show don’t tell
Naughty Dog decided to make not a nasty, blood-soaked and violent slasher, but instead fully embrace the 18-certificate to make a game that unflinchingly tackled grown-up themes and scenes. Instead of bouncing through the usual tropes found in survival horror games – or for that matter zombie apocalypse movies and TV shows – they instead decided to focus on the lives and emotions of the characters that had to live in that world.
I’ll be revealing plot points here so… SPOILER ALERT! Turn back if you’re not familiar with Joel and Ellie’s journey.
From the outset of The Last Of Us, the scars borne by Joel after the loss of his daughter are all too clear, and when Ellie is placed in his charge, the effects of that damage are made all the more raw. As the game reaches its climax, the mental and emotional weight of his past causes Joel to make a difficult and ultimately terrible and selfish decision – a decision that he wilfully keeps from Ellie.
Arguably even more than any action sequence, puzzle or game mechanic, this emotional denouement is clearly the focus of Naughty Dog’s thinking – so much so that the lead-in to The Last Of Us Part II is a stark recap of the events of that dark day, including the clenched-jaw reaction of a young Ellie as she directly confronts Joel as he lies to her once more.
From here, the new chapter leads the player into the world via the people that live there, eschewing clumsy tutorial levels and replacing them with a gentle horse ride, low-key conversations and walks through the post-Cordyceps society. Control schemes and interactions are drip-fed to the player, which is a two-fold success. First, the player is never overwhelmed with options and mechanics, and second, the narrative is allowed to unfold naturally without the player feeling the need to skip through the considered and apposite dialog.
What’s more, the maturity applied to the way the story is told contrasts remarkably with the juvenile action-movie plotting found in many horror games. Events outside the player’s view are woven into conversations and the game switches viewpoint from character to character without feeling the need to clumsily explain exactly where you are or even WHO you are – you will just have to discover that as you go on.
We care because you do
All this builds not only a believable world populated by believable characters, but expands the focus to introduce the idea of multiple – and sometimes conflicting – viewpoints of the people and events portrayed. It drags the usual black and white of the good guys and bad guys of game design into an encompassing grey area where the experiences of multiple characters and allegiances are given as much validity as any other.
This flies in the face of the traditional Hero’s Journey plot pattern employed in games (including the Uncharted series), making the collection of events, from the horrific to the heartfelt, that take place throughout the game’s time building blocks that construct the personalities and psychologies of all the featured characters. You may choose to identify with particular individuals, or even come dislike some more than others, but they’re never less than convincing.
Everyone welcome
The game world generally has a barrier to entry not experienced by that of TV and movies. If you live with visual, aural or mobility issues, you can usually still enjoy films and TV programs, whereas games require a certain level of ability to even begin playing.
Naughty Dog are clearly totally committed to allowing EVERYONE to be able to experience the story they’ve poured so much effort into. The Last Of Us Part II has an unprecedented level of accessibility options, from high-contrast visuals and assistive control schemes to well-thought out details like adding directional arrows to subtitles so hearing-impaired players still get a sense of where pertinent sounds and dialogue sit in the world.
With this adding to the ability to play the game at a wide range of difficulty levels, it’s obvious that Naughty Dog want everyone that enters the world of The Last Of Us to make the full journey through the tale and love the characters as much as they do.
In our world of quick-fire multiplayer shooters and casual phone games, such a commitment is both singular and impressive. And I love Naughty Dog for it.
