The music and voice performances are lifted straight from the original game, and the direction of cinematic sequences are completely faithful - but when they were so good to begin with, why change it?

Level design and enemy placement is identical to the original, but the enemy AI has been significantly improved, which means some encounters can play out quite a bit differently. It’s a massive visual upgrade over the original, and there are numerous other significant improvements - but the experience of playing the game itself will be extremely familiar to anyone who has experienced The Last of Us on the PS3 or PS4. The Last of Us Part I is a complete rebuild of the game (and its excellent two-ish hour DLC Left Behind), but it’s a bit of a different beast than remakes like Resident Evil 2 and Final Fantasy VII. Now, two years later, my wish has been granted. When I first played the sequel, I took note of a very brief sequence showing the game’s protagonists Joel and Ellie walking through a ruined city - the vastly improved animation and fidelity of the scene made me want to see more of a world that I had spent so much time in rendered with modern technology. Facial expressions are less lifelike, and the environments, while still beautiful and well-designed, lack a certain level of depth and detail.Īs Naughty Dog co-president and The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann tells it, the idea for this remake came when they were animating flashbacks for Part II. But, compared to The Last of Us Part II, which came out in June of 2020, the original shows its age. After all, Naughty Dog remastered the original game in 2014 for the PS4, giving it 1080p graphics at 60 fps, and it still looks solid. That conspiracy theory has been debunked by the folks behind the game, but the fact the idea could exist at all reveals something uncomfortable about what limited types of bodies we are used to seeing in the medium.Ever since Sony and Naughty Dog announced The Last of Us Part I, a $70, ground-up PS5 remake of the classic 2013 PS3 game, there’s been an intense discussion around whether this even needs to exist. Perhaps the grossest result of all of this is the insistence that Abby could only look like this if her character was trans, as if only folks who are assigned male at birth could possibly have big muscles. Is there enough food for someone in the post-apocalypse to mass up like this? (Yes, the WLF is canonically depicted to have plenty of resources.) Can we really say this is a realistic body type if theoretically you have to train for ages to achieve it? (Realism has no bearing on how common something is, just whether or not it can be true.) This, of course, doesn’t satisfy some detractors - it just changes the debate.

64DhGmQod5- Mari-Ojibwe(Native American) writer on rest hiatus July 1, 2020 Me: May I present to you Colleen Fotsch whom Abby's body was based on. Bigoted male gamers: Abby is unrealistic women can never look like that

Last of us 2 character model