Let me preface this thread by saying I do not hate The Last of Us, but am confused when people say it is the greatest game of the generation.

Is it definitively not the best game of the previous gen? I don't know. But I fail to see why it garnered the rave acclaim it did.

In my opinion, it was a very good game, but the mechanics felt like they were weaker than the Uncharted games--by this I mean they felt clunkier. I know Joel is not Nathan Drake, but I mean it had a feeling that, to me, was reminiscent of survival-horror tank controls. It didn't feel fluid, and was definitely one a barrier to me that separated me from the story.

Secondly, the story. Yeah, it's really competent. The ending is really good. In fact, the ending is great! But aside from a couple zombie-trope subversions, it's just okay. Definitely way above average for a video game, but still only alright.

I'd like to ask again for people not to be upset. I'm not shitting all over it, and I'm going to buy the remastered edition because it's a really good game. It just didn't strike me as being a slap-myself-in-the-face-this-is-so-good experience.

Also, I did do a lot of subconscious comparing of this game to Shadow of the Colossus, which to me is not only the greatest game of the PS2 era, but maybe one of the best ever.

It's brutal and human, the combat mechanics are deep and demanding, the stealth is based on acting quickly rather than slowly, it moves faster than a speeding bullet, can leap higher than the tallest train, and Ellie is one of the best video game characters ever.

Some of the puzzles suck and the first chapter (not the prelude) is dumb, but other than that it's damn near perfect in my opinion. Fuzzy textures and all.

It might be the best or second best game but that doesn't mean it "defined" the generation; that honor goes to Modern Warfare almost certainly for making virtually every game after have a similar multiplayer system and/or being an FPS. That said the generation wasn't great so its a dubious honor at best.

I played it and I certainly see what people like about it but its far from the masterpiece it's being described as. I thought there where too much combat and pacing was rough.

The gameplay being clunky serves the story, Joel is way too old for this shit and Ellie is inexperienced.

I would argue it is a possible Game of the Generation because it represents so many of the big trends of the generation. Third Person shooter, cinematic action sequences, zombies( "infected" but those dudes be zombies), tacked on multiplayer, stealth mechanics in a non-stealth game, crafting, Nolan North and Troy Baker. I find it really paints a strong picture of the last generation.

Personally I loved the gameplay, and after playing The Last of Us with its more realistic combat, it's hard to go back to play Uncharted. The characters were great, and it is possible that it will influence third person shooters in taking a more realistic approach to combat, without bullet sponge enemies, and with more realistic gun shot wounds. I also loved the story till the last chapter, where the ending didn't sit well with me, but I can understand it. The characters were also great and humane. The locales were interesting. There were a couple of niggling flaws, but dismissable. For me it's one of the best games of this generation, but that honour in my opinion belongs to Bioshock Infinite, with its breathtaking design (and I'm not even a fan of the FPS genre).

It's not. It's an ok effort at retreading stuff that was already done not long before it in a not as great way.

The ending is also, not great, but serviceable in that it does make you think about how they shoe horned in the fact that you're technically playing a sociopath.

It's an ok game in a sea of ok games.

Dark Souls was a much better game out of the entirety of last generation. It has way more going for it as a video game than The Last of Us and is just altogether a much better game. No other game compared to it.

If people have to ask, then it probably isn't the generation defining game. People should just look at it and go "Yes, that game was" without the need for persuasive reasoning

As a storytelling device it's excellent. The 'game' part of the game is very average.

Opinions?

Some people see Star Wars as a groundbreaking and innovative film. Others see it as hokey space cowboy crap.

The multiplayer was most certainly not ''tacked on'', nor is the stealth as you seem to be implying.

Anywhoo, The Last of Us isn't my favourite game of the generation, but it's certainly up there. It works for me because it perfectly blends its survival-orientated and improvisation-heavy gameplay with its desperate, downtrodden story; the shooting feels powerful, the melee feels blunt and painful, and the stealth could have me holding my breath at times it was that intense.

The story, while on paper seems somewhat basic, is character driven by two of the better characters of the previous generation, particularly Ellie. While the plot is mostly straightforward up until the end, the flawless performances go a long way in making the characters seem relatable and human, which is still currently a rarity for video games even as the quality of character writing improves.

I'm not in love with the jaded attitude that seems to surround the GB community...

The game is the perfect capstone on a generation of video games that centered around grizzled dudes committing hardcore murder on tons of other dudes.

It's the Game of the Generation in the sense that it is the perfect poster-child of everything this generation was, all the way down to the fight to even get Ellie on the box at all.

Man, I agree so much. Just make an effort to avoid threads like this, and you'll be fine.

The game was alright but to call it a generation defining game is kind of jumping the gun. I think you can look back at some ps2 games like FF X and make that bold statement but it's still too early to call any game from last generation defining. I remember when the psx came out Medal of Honor looked like a game that would carry that title to the ps2 / xbox era cause of how good it was of an fps on console. I think most people have forgotten about that game in favor of something like goldeneye which was the original fps trendsetter on n64 and was probably far more popular during that period.

That's not true at all. There is rarely if ever a unanimous opinion on a book/movie/game being good. I can start a thread similar to this except with Half Life or Half Life 2, games that arguably revolutionized story telling in video games, and find plenty of people who will say they hate the game or think I am a complete idiot.

Also The Last of Us is a generation defining game.

A little too hyped. But it had powerful believable characters.

hipsters, there fucking everywhere

and i should know, im from marin county

You are going to get the idiots who can't admit stuff, yes, but there can still be a generally accepted opinion about what game is the most defining. I absolutely dislike the Call of Duty games, I never played one for more than 20 minutes, but I can agree that it definitely defined this generation. It is responsible for the huge jump in videogame sales, it helped push the idea of DLC for better or worse, it caused so many games, popular ones like Halo and Last of Us, to have an XP based multiplayer component. It is also the most widely known videogame across the world.

In my opinion, it goes like this: Gears of War jumpstarted this generation and popularized a new genre, cover based shooter.

Call of Duty skyrocketed videogames as a whole and created the XP driven multiplayer

And Last of Us is the greatest singleplayer experience of this gen, and is almost a culmination of the biggest things this gen was about. But I don't think its what defines the entire generation.

Wow, you really don't have much ground to stand on. SotC was a pretty freakin' flawed game. It was novel, it was gorgeous at the time, but it was certainly flawed. It also does not hold up well when you aren't in a nostalgia haze. The gameplay was extremely clumsy at times. Awesome at others. But clunky plenty of the time. The movement was pretty shitty a lot of the time, the controls were a bit unresponsive at times, and while it was impressive for the time, the physical nature of climbing got really frustrating at time when the system just failed to recognize a state in which you should have more control.

Once again we see that this just comes down to one simple fact: it's all subjective. If you think SotC was the best game ever, it totally was. For you. It doesn't even compare to modern games in my book. ArmA 3 is hugely flawed and yet I'll shout praise for it and encourage people to join in on it with me till the end of time. Or until the sequel comes.

Many people consider Dark Souls the best game ever made. And I certainly think it's up there. But it's also pretty flawed. PvP was pretty fucked up if you weren't JUST in it for PvP and you weren't keeping up with the way the community was going, you weren't researching builds and weapons and stats and tactics, or you had anything but the perfect combination of networking factors in the right spot to not have an experience that bordered on unplayable when it comes to latency online.

I don't agree that The Last of Us is a generation defining game. But to a lot of people I'm sure it is.

Lets just leave it at that, because otherwise this is just going to continue being a thread where people assert their opinions as facts. There is no such thing as a universal best game or defining game or anything like that.

For the sake of argument though, Last of Us is too fresh in everyone's minds to be discussed seriously just yet. And I think we also need to understand what "generation defining" means. Lets assume it means that it set the course for an entire generation of games, in which case, there are a few games that would be much better fits for the title. Call of Duty 4 was hugely defining of multiplayer experiences this generation. Oblivion/Fallout 3 were extremely influential. GTA 4 opened the flood gates on open world mission based shooters. Bioshock paved the way for games like Last of Us to exist. Hard to consider Last of Us as generation defining when it isn't even really GENRE defining.

Then if we assume that generation defining are the titles that we look back at to represent the generation I think we will once again find ourselves with a number of titles, many of which were on the previous list. Halo 3, Fallout 3, Bioshock, Gears of War, Fez, Uncharted, Assassin's Creed. Probably a couple I'm not thinking of, but you get the point.

I'd argue that Last of Us fits neither of those, or perhaps just barely the latter. It builds upon things from other games almost exclusively. It does very little that is new, only better. It's not to say it's not an excellent game, but there is very little it has done to really mold this generation. Part of that is because of when it came out, and most of that is because of what it built on. It might be a game that you think of when you think of the generation but I would argue that there are games that would better take it's place, such as Bioshock which regardless of relative quality was just more influential and has probably been played by far more people.

There isn't a generation defining game for the industry. There might be for you. There may very well be a single game that when you think gen whatever-it-is consoles. But that is entirely based on you and your experiences, your tastes. Everyone else has to figure out their own.

I think The Last of Us managed to make its mechanics and story cohere brilliantly, and that's the point. The world feels freaking desperate. The clickers are scary. The humans feel intelligent and dangerous. Joel is both brutal and old, but still very, very competent at killing. Ellie is extremely competent, and, eventually, just as competent at killing if not more so (her knife, man...). The environmental storytelling that Bioshock made mainstream feels powerful here, without feeling as contrived.

The game plays just like it wants you to feel. The characters do what it makes sense for them to do based on the narrative. It's that combination that, for me at least, makes it defining, or, perhaps, culminating.

Like, if someone asks you what single-player games were about from 2006-2014, The Last of Us would hit all the aspects and exemplify them.

It is not perfect. It has some glaring issues in there, and some poorly designed bits, but it is defining, according to my definition.

Those that make the last word do not affect what was before them, but they certainly colour the way things are remembered.

In some ways, this is an extension of the question: "is the most defining moment the ultimate result, or the event that started it all?" Ultimately, The Last of Us, like most pieces of art or culture, is a response directly reflecting the media before and surrounding it. For many, they find that it had one of the most captivating ideas to express about the generation, so that may be why they find it so iconic for the generation.

@azrailx HA. Too true. Though hipsters are easier to avoid in Giant Bomb than Marin (ba dum ch)

The more advanced generations of consoles move gaming further and further away from the technical aspects. No longer do artists and programmers have to struggle just to create graphics that display the nuance of what they want you to see.

Much like how movies had to perfect image quality, color and sound over time, gaming has had to advance the technology to create a medium for art.

And now, like film, gaming has largely done that. As such, the idea of what is good is beginning to be more about the art of a title than the technology of it.

And TLoU is a tour de force in that area. Years ago Ebert riled up the industry with the question of whether games are art, implicitly asking if games even can be art. TLoU, in a way no other major title has done, has shown us that the answer is unequivocally yes.

Yes, you are put on rails at times because the story requires you solve certain situations in certain ways. That's just the realities of games right now. Maybe it won't be so in the future, but you don't mark a game down today for not doing what we don't yet know how to do.

This game has spectacle, it has agency, it has a great story and amazing characters. That's why it is a big deal and it is a defining game of the generation.

Meanwhile, Burnout: Paradise is also a defining game of the generation because it advances the state of the art in interactivity.

Two different things and neither precludes the other being well regarded.

It's one of the games you could count on one hand that has a good and well executed story. I think that's pretty major.

A linear third person shooter with a dumb plot, good acting, fantastic motion capture and animations, money dumped into it, looks like ass since it's running on aged hardware, shallowish gameplay, collectibles, token stealth, requiring little to no thought or effort, zombies. It definitely felt like a culmination of the AAA last gen experience, that's for sure.

I never quite got why it was so good, but then, survival horror's never been my thing.

I loved the characters, story, setting(s) and music but the gameplay is clunky and frustrating. The stealth is solid but once you hit open combat against clickers and runners you may as well restart from a checkpoint unless you're halfway done the game and have unlocked a bunch of perks. I was tired of that kind of stealth when Splinter Cell was still doing "one alarm and you're done Fisher!" missions. The gameplay gets much better as you go along and starts to find a grove around when you reach Pittsburgh. I think it actually starts to shine when you play through in NG+ and have some decent combat options from the start.

"Generation defining" is a weird title but for me personally it's definitely one of the best games of last generation. It's the first Naughty Dog game I could appreciate every aspect of. I never understood the people who say that its gameplay is clunky because I had a ton of fun playing it especially because I think that it's one of the first games that gets the stealth/combat mix right. The way you can improvise during encounters with the options you have made for some very unique moments. You should play it on harder difficulties though because that's where that stuff really comes into play. It gets even better once you start a NG+. It looked fantastic given that it was running on aged hardware and I thought the story was really well done. I'm going to pick up the PS4 version when the price goes down a bit and I'm going to play it for a third time something I very rarely do.

@regularassmilk: I felt as if the game summarized almost everything this previous generation was striving for. It's gameplay was full of very context sensitive situations, as I mentioned in the No Upgrade Discount thread there's an encounter early in the game at a library (in the Pittsburgh chapter) like area that I used to show the game off to friends over the Christmas holiday. Every single time I played it something different happened and I was forced to approach things in a whole new way. I especially loved the way cover wasn't attached to a button, it was just something that happened naturally when you approached cover.

Being that the Grand Theft Auto games are based entirely around snap-to-X gameplay it still feels right there, but for most other games it now feels strange to have to press a button to get into cover (though I admit the way cover transfer is handled in Watch_Dogs satisfies in its own way) and extremely satisfying when you don't (Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes, for example).

It also, as you mentioned, made it abundantly clear that all the work developers had been doing to improve the narrative thrust of games had finally born some real fruit. The Uncharted games were great action games, the Metal Gear games were great Japanese psychobabble, but The Last of Us was the first time video games really delivered a tightly wound, compact story about a group of people that was emotionally resonant and mentally stimulating. The characters that came in and out of the game were the same as a character in, say, a Jax game - here's the part you need, here's the information you need to move forward, here's my death so you feel inspired to kill others - but they've disguised all that stuff so well compared to most games. It felt truly cinematic in that way, and was a great achievement I think we'll better understand the ramifications of in a few years.

It was groundbreaking and innovative in the medium of film making. The subject matter is a bunch of hokey space cowboy crap.

Big budget action games are about delivering the most kickass action fun. The Last of Us subverts that, and for a big budget game that's saying a lot. It was very refreshing to see an action game really try something different.

I'm not sure the game is defining, however. That remains to be seen if more future games take influence from The Last of Us. As far as last generation goes, I think Uncharted 2 was more defining, but I hope The Last of Us does the same thing for this gen.

Also, it's impossible to say that a single video game could define an entire 8 years' worth of games. Games change too quickly for that.

I don't see The Last of Us as generation defining. I see it as the dot at the end of the paragraph that was a generation filled with exclamation points.

@theoracleofgame: this just in, the close proximity to marin is turning all the editors at giantbomb into hipsterish debbie downers, just wait Dan is next!

as a side note every time i'm listening to the bombcast, as I commute north towards petaluma, I look at all the traffic going to SF, and just laugh at Jeff...

I didn't play the game (yet), but one thing that sort of ruined my want for the game was the AI.

I don't know but it was kinda cool.

I may as well start a thread called Why is Stairway to Heaven the best guitar solo?

These "come defend popular opinion to me" threads are real bizarre.

No one will ever say anything to change what you thought, so, what's the point?

I wouldn't call it generation-defining. I'd give that to the likes of Mass Effect 2 or Call of Duty 4. But it was definitely one of my favourites, and I do believe it's one of the best representations of the cinematic style of video-game that became so popular this generation.

I think the wording should be Last of Us is the definition of this generation, but it didn't define this generation. I think thats part of the confusion

I think among the average gamer , The Last of Us defines this generation because of it's narrative and game play. If you take a look back at what games this generation were striving for, they all seemed to want to tell an engaging story and bring the line of cinematics and game play closer together. Of course this is arguable, but in my opinion The Last of Us exceeded at this because it hit high notes all around. The combat was basic to grasp and worked without a hitch, but it was made to seem complicated because of the lack of supplies and ammo, which gave the game play this frantic feeling of desperateness when it came to combat. Writing in gaming is typically atrocious, but this time around we got something that was actually better than average and the characters were all pretty much likable or relatable in some regard. To me, this was just one of those games were everything just works harmoniously and there are so many few games that do that. In the future if someone asked me specifically which game from last gen represented the best in game design, I would probably say The Last of Us.

It's a fairly simple game, that brings zero innovation but is executed masterfully. The gaming press likes this a lot.

The story is also nothing original, it's straightforward and never tries to surprise people. It goes down a very clear path but once again execute on it perfectly.

The only things in it that are well beyond the reach of 99.9% of games out there as well as many great TV shows and movies tackling similar subjects are the writing and acting. The story not being original notwithstanding, the writing and acting are outstanding.

@pr1mus said:

Just bolding the parts I agree with.

I'm not sure where this idea that a game or piece of fiction needs to be innovative in order to count came from, but it's bad and people should feel bad for thinking it. What makes a work's quality isn't how "original" it is but rather how well it's made. The Last of Us is no different than say, The Road (but The Road is streets ahead), but The Last of Us is deftly handled in both its themes and the execution of its mechanics. I don't think anyone could rightly argue for more than that.

I should probably mention that while I understand why people enjoy TLOU, I personally didn't. I found it kind of tedious and plodding, but to each their own.

It is a fantastic game but I agree, I think there are other games that truly define the generation. Generation Defining games... I have to look at BioShock, COD4 and....probably Red Dead.

Me personally none of those are in my top 5 from last gen but overrall at least two of those had the largest impact where RDR was just a fantastic game that truly felt different from everything (and yet felt so similar to so many things).

I think Skyrim is the game that is going to define THIS generation of games. How many companies now say that they want to put Skyrim-esque things into their game (Witcher 3 and Dragon Age to name a few).

Oh gosh. No. It isn't even close. Like, what? I've never heard anyone outside of a silly comment here and there say anything close to this.

@nightriff said:

This is a big reason why I can't help but love Bethesda despite their games not necessarily hitting all targets. Skyrim came out when the MOBA/MMO/ALWAYS ONLINE/MULTIPLAYER FOCUSED games were in full force, and here's this single player RPG that just steamrolled everything with millions upon millions of units sold. I appreciate Skyrim if only because it made certain developers like Bioware wake the fuck up and recognize that, if you make a great game, people will buy it regardless of its online connectivity.

Amen to all of this. Why I look foreword to every Bethesda made game now, they just get what I look for in a game at the specific time. Unfortunately they need to solve the return playthrough that I like to do a few years after the games came out. Tried playing both Skyrim and Fallout 3 this year and just wasn't as memorable as when I first played them.