Quick Look: The Last of Us

I really like this game when it's a stealth game.

I really hate this game during its "now you have to play it like a third person shooter" sections.

@icantbestopped: It's addressed and shown multiple times throughout the game.

The video quality seemed pretty bad on this QL.

@jimithing83: It's disabled automatically on harder difficulty levels. You can also turn it off manually on any difficulty level.

@quietyith: You can walk right in front of them and both clickers and runners will never notice your flashlight.

Runners can, their eyesight is shitty but still functional. Game gives you a prompt about that during the first big runner room.

Oh man I've been playing this game for a while now on hard and now it is crazy brutal. Patrick is playing on normal here and he has so much stuff! I've never had that much stuff in my backpack on hard. Really worth playing on hard. I've been on edge with every encounter. I've had to do encounters completely different because of the lack of my bullets or health kits or explosives or whatever. It's a fantastic game and I am so drained from it. Had to stop myself tonight so I don't overdo it. Hopefully I'll get to finish it this week.

It feels like Patrick either didn't get some things or my experience with the game made it seem like it. For one, I felt like Listen Mode showed me ALL enemies in range regardless of wether you spotted them or not or wether they made noise. Also, strangling enemies might be loud but doesn't seem to alert clickers. And right out of the gate the ammo and other supplies never seemed sparse playing on normal.

"Throwing shit to make guards walk there" is perhaps my least favorite game mechanic in anything. My interest in this game has dropped considerably, since it seems as if you have to do that a bunch here.

You don't have to. I barely have.

Throwing things is actually kind of a bad idea since it sends almost everyone into alert mode. The only time i throw things is when im about to be caught and I need a really fast takedown.

Bricks are great for melee combat, especially against clickers. Often I'll punch a runner, quickly equip the brick and whack the bejaysus outta him. Brutal, but brutal.

Glad I watched this. I was at the section with the infected runners and clicker and was having a horrible time trying to figure out where to go while avoiding the enemies. Knowing that I have to kill everyone there makes a huge difference. Definitely the weakest section of the game so far. After the story/character building highs from the start of the game this was the part where the gameplay started to impede my enjoyment of the game rather then add to it.

The one thing that I have a huge problem with in the game is how your companions react "between" sequences. I'll be in a situation where I'm sneaking around an unfamiliar place, and your companions will just walk around paying no attention to you. It really screws the immersion since they basically announce "Nothing is going to happen despite being in a totally new place!"

I really wish it was like Skyrim where once you enter stealth mode your companions would do the same.

The most jarring thing is when you realize that the companions are invisible to enemy AI if you are.

It never ceases to freak me out though when someone rolls up right next to a crouched companion.

Most definately! I got killed and or spotted so many times because my AI partners would walk in front of me or behind me and push me. This game IS NOT as good as it's being credited for. The story is totally generic you can see shit coming a mile away. There were parts I had to repeat like 10 or 11 times on normal. NOT FUN. I really do think it's just because it's naughty dog that it's reviewing so well. I believe Polygon gave it the most reasonable score.

Man, it's times like this that I wish I had a PS3. Hopefully that gaikai service for the PS4 makes it easy for me to go back and play some of the PS3 exclusives that I missed.

Well no, this was probably not a reason for you being spotted. They're coded to be invisible if you are undetected. It is a very strange thing but the AI won't do anything to actually get you killed.

Would love to see sitdown of jeff, brad vinny and the others talking about this game after playing it like you did with bioshock infinite

@zoggy1 said:

Seconded

@kazzenn said:

When the AI pushes you out of cover yes it does get you spotted. Or are you calling me a liar? Because this happened to me on numerous occasions.

Well I haven't been standing over your shoulder watching to be able to call liar, but I've never seen this happen and stealth is the only approach I've taken to this game. From everything I've seen the AI either takes cover right beside you, not moving, or more often takes cover behind something else a little ways behind. Never had any other character shove me from a hiding spot.

So at the very least I do question the assertion that it is common.

@efesell: The AI definitely pushes you out of cover. I had it happen quite often in the early game. I don't think Ellie does, but it happened to me quite a few times with the first companion.

As well as Patrick did to keep this QL spoiler free I would appeal to people to go into this game as ignorant as possible, it's an experience that is constantly building and seeing any thing, however out of context, is lessening that journey.

First encounter with soldiers at night, we were sneaking by fine until Tess STOOD THE FUCK UP AND RAN INTO A GUARD, killing us all.

She then did it three more times.

Holy shit, there are some cynical assholes on these boards. The game is amazing and it blows my mind regularly how awesome it looks graphically. Note that I am writing this on a $2000 PC I bought half a year ago, which I regularly use to play games on. This game goes far beyond anything I ever thought the PS3 could handle.

Just beat this game yesterday and man is this such an awesome game, an emotional roller coaster throughout. While I enjoyed stealthily going around taking dudes out the shooting aspect of the game was unfortunately a bit of a let down.

finding the ai to be a pain in the ass in some sections. either the enemies are blind/deaf and don't react to the out of breath old guy squatting 2 feet to the left, or ellie keeps darting back and forth in front of enemies like she WANTS to die. totally don't think the game deserves all the perfect scores it's gotten. it's a fantastic game to be sure, and when everything clicks it can create taught experiences that have me holding my breath as i try to sneak past a room of clickers, but it still has a few shortcomings in my opinion that i honestly think naughty dog could have ironed out with some more time

I don't think that it was with the Uncharted series that the term "ludonarrative dissonance" got popularized. My experience at least was that it kinda popped up in reaction to GTAIV, from the whole cutscene/story-Niko vs. open-world-mayhem-Niko.

This perhaps sums up my opinion best. The UI is horrible at letting you know how much noise you're making, the insta-kills with the Clickers are infuriating and often come for seemingly no reason, the shooting is way too swimmy, the story covers every single zombie trope... It's a great character piece, but a pretty mediocre game.

Just finished the game so now I can finally watch this.

I need to pick this up! Looks like a lot of fun.

Troy Baker is the new Nolan North. I suppose there's worse things than hearing Kanji Tatsumi in every AAA game that's come out in 2013.

I find him more difficult to pick out than Nolan North was though at least. Maybe it's just me, but there have been several cases in which I had found out that Troy Baker voiced a certain character and then said "wait, really?" (Ocelot in the MGS5 trailers for example), Where as with Nolan North, he pretty much always sounds exactly the same.

It does look good - for a 7 year old console. Once I remembered that I was pretty impressed, otherwise PC games from years ago blow it away.

It pushed my PS3 hard it seems, never heard the fans go that loud before, and a lot of framerate chugging but nothing unplayable. Damn fine game.

Thats not necessarily Nolan Norths fault. if anything, its Naughty Dogs fault for having him use his normal voice for Drake. After that other companies are just like "just do what you did in Uncharted *coughSpecOpscough*" He has the range to do voices that dont sound anything like his normal voice. He did the robot caretaker in Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time and i was surprised reading that it was him in the credits. Troy Baker just hasnt had that "iconic" role yet to define what his "default" character voice will be.

But, I vote for the GB crew bringing back the Northie during GoTY and having Troy Baker be all the nominees.

It was a disappointing to see them mention the health kit upgrade they picked up and say it was "a little gamey".

If you open your bag and read those upgrades they are awesome little survival books that actually give Joel instruction on how to build his items better. It's super cool and fits right in line with the little details that Patrick talks about making this game special.

always be strangling

There are moments when I consider buying a new PS3 just so I can play this game.

I love the way they explain the zombies, and I love when games treat guns as the loud, dirty, messy things they are instead of just some hit-scan magic wand.

Just got this game and holy hell its one hell of a video game experience, can't put it down!

Do you like to play video games? Play this game.

RIP Ryan.

Anyone know if Ryan finish this game?

Guns in this game are crucial. You need them. Unless you want to do the trial and error stealth for a long time by reloaded the last checkpoint over and over again, it's way faster to just kill and shoot everything.

This game is really great, but the stealth isn't very. You really shouldn't reload checkpoints when you get caught as it will get frustrating very fast and killing everything is way more effective.

A good rule of tumb is to just stealth until you get caught and then go into beserk and kill everything. I found it satisfying, though I do not care for Clickers. They are overpowered with no explanation. I'm playing on hard, so perhaps that's why, but Clickers are pretty much immune to melee attacks. You either need to kill them with an upgraded melee weapon, or shooting them. I do not really care for the encouters where Clickers are thrown into the mix. Their 'you're in my instant death-radius' ability makes things frustrating. I probably should have invested in shiv master though.

By the way, as far as I can tell, playing on hard doesn't make supplies any less available. I'm almost always packing full gear (71% in right now) and often have to leave something behind. It seems to just affect how hard enemies are to kill, how much damage they do and possibly a greater number of enemies (Clickers aren't a huge problem for a friend of mine who is playing on normal and they seemed weaker in this video then I'm used to).

I am kind off ranting about the Clickers though. I now have good ways to deal with them, but that's because I've adapted my playstyle to them specifically. It's totally manageable now, but I reckon it's more fun if they are scaled more appropriately to what they actually are; an organism that should't be able to take 5 times as much punishment as others the same size and shouldn't be able to magically parry every single melee attack with a solid steel bar (especially since they can't see).

Amazing game though. It will be at least in my top 3 of this year.

@efesell the AI is pretty bad. He's actually right, they shove me around sometimes and frequently they are in the way of a spot I want to be at and will not move. Worst I've had happen was me strangling an infected and them moving 'past' me as I was doing it, which glitched my character back and forth a significant distance getting me spotted.

Finished the game, time to check out the QL!

I never knew this game had a Quick Look. Must've completely missed it. Can't wait to check it out!

Game of the year 2013...I must of missed this quick look. Weird to hear Ryan's voice...man I miss that voice on Quick Looks.

I know this is kind of an old conversation, but I'm playing through the game again on survivor before the DLC comes out. Wondering if y'all realized Nolan North actually did voice a character in this game (David.) I didn't realize until the credits rolled on my first playthrough.