Naughty Dog says that The Last of Us won’t be too much in-your-face about its violence or the way it portrays its negative character. The brutality will be just something that everyone does, something that’s part of the daily life, and even the foes in the game will be portrayed in a humanized way, giving players something to think about.
“We’re going to make the violence as real as possible, so you buy into the scrounging, the scrambling – the desperation these people have,” game director Neil Druckmann told IB Times. “It was important to show that Joel is not necessarily a good guy. We don’t glorify these kills. It’s like he’s just doing what they would do.”
He then went on to talk about how the “bad guys” of The Last of Us will be portrayed.
“In the games we worked on in the past, we’d do whatever we could to suggest that the bad guys were bad,” he said. “You’d see them kill someone, or we’d design them will a skull on them, like in Jak and Daxter. Either through story or design we’d say that these guys are good and these guys are bad.
“Here, we took the opposite approach and thought about how we could humanize these guys, how we could show that these guys really cared for each other. So, when you do engage them, you feel like you’re just like them but with a different objective.”
“It’s not just about spraying blood up the walls,” he continued. “You see it in the context of what it is.”
“Like Ellie, over the journey you get desensitized to it,” Druckmann added. “Players will go through these ups and downs where they’ll be horrified by it, then get used to it and then be horrified by it again.”
The Last of Us releases exclusively for the PS3 on May 7. Stay tuned for continued coverage.