TLOU Was An Exploratory Gameplay Experience At Some Point In Development

A lot has been said on The Last of Us, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any juicy tidbits left to share. We have one for you today, thanks to this interview published on Audio Gang, a community dedicated to audio in games.

As fitting with the source, the long Q&A with Naughty Dog’s audio programmer Jonathan Lanier and audio lead Phil Kovats is mainly filled with technical discussion about audio in games and specifically in TLOU, but there is also some very interesting info about gameplay, which apparently was very different from the final iteration at some point during development.

We were trying to do something different with the gameplay – we were slowing down the player – you couldn’t jump, there weren’t auto-firing weapons, there weren’t waves of enemies coming at you, it was a more exploratory kind of gameplay experience. It was actually more about what the player couldn’t do than what they could do. So, there ended up being a lot of iteration on the hand-to-hand, melee combat for the game. They put some stuff in, then took it out, then changed it, then changed it again, then took it out and started over.

Personally, I believe TLOU strikes an almost perfect balance between combat & exploration, but the question remains - would you have liked TLOU to be less about action and more about scouting the environments?

It’s also intriguing to read how they managed to create such satisfying sounds for melee combat: after trying many variations, they ended up with the most reductive option.

…what it came down to was that we knew we wanted the hand- to-hand combat to be very visceral, intimate and very brutal. But it was almost like the less you heard, or the more realistic we made it, the better it was. We didn’t sweeten a lot of it – there are hardly any whooshes or whatever, most of it is just cloth and the sound of knuckles. So, we had to go down a lot of roads only to find that they didn’t go anywhere, until we found that the more reductive and simplistic we were then the worse it sounded. In the best possible way!

Naughty Dog is often hailed as master of visuals, but they are just as dedicated into making stunning audio as well. Not every developer gets this, unfortunately, which is why I’m excited to see what they are doing with Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.