The Sword and Laser discussion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVFP8S...

Holy fuc*..

Why did I sell my PS3 again?

very very nice. i may have a reason to dust off my old ps3

I'm looking forward to this one. I hope there isn't too much killing or that there are ways of avoiding some of it. I understand video games need to find that sweet bit of play and then repeat it again and again. I enjoyed, and actually kind of loved, Naughty Dog's Uncharted games, especially number 2, but I couldn't help feeling that, in Nathan Drake, I was playing a charming, scary psychopath.

I hope Naughty Dog took what was good from Uncharted, stole the idea from 'I am alive' and have put together something that feels like your actually trying to survive 'realistically' rather than figure out how to solve room full of dudes, some with guns, puzzles. With platforming bits in betwixed the gunplay

well, from what i saw, it seems that ammo is a very limited and valuable resource. i also noticed that there was a stealth element to the game play. quiet take downs and things of that nature. i'm just assuming that there could have been a way to avoid that particular fight altogether, but for the sake of the demo, they wanted to make it as exciting as possible (sneaking around them and avoiding the whole encounter would have been boring)

what kind of impressed me was the dialogue. it seemed very natural for all the complex things going on screen. little things that could change if the circumstances were different, like when the first bad guy saw the protagonist, and calls out to his buddies. or what they say as they find an alternate route into the room they were in. all of those lines had to be scripted, but they seemed natural to the flow of the actions that you choose to take.

also, at the end where the guy begs for his life, i'm wondering if you can either choose to let him live or simply finish him off. for me it's hard to kill off a guy, even if it's a video game that's this life like. i'm not counting games like gears of war, or mass effect, where you have to kill people to progress. maybe add in a renegade/paragon element, to help focus on the kind of character your protagonist shapes out to be.

yeah, the dialogue did seem really interesting, it might be inevitable that it could loop or have trigger events that happen often. hopefully they leave in multiple recording sessions so the dialogue doesn't get annoying, even different inflections would be fine.

It would be interesting if you had the choice to kill or let live but I have a feeling all the enemies in this game are bad news and if you don't end or subdue them in some way they will revert back to attack mode. Even the stuff like the guy behind the corner with a pipe seems a little scripted, maybe not at that exact spot but it seems 'dude with a pipe around the bend' will be something that happens more than enough times to become puzzley.

I'm also wondering if you can get your lady friend to throw shit at dudes on command, or if fireing an empty gun will become an overused mechanic.

i was wondering the same thing about repeated dialogue. it'd be great if they have some sort of algorithm that tells the characters that they already used that line, and shouldn't use it again, but that's inevitable. for little stuff like, "we can't go this way" or "i can't do that". those lines are in nearly every game. but for big set pieces, like this fight, i just hope that every fight won't be the same.

one thing that kind of took me out of the element of the game was the hud at the bottom of the screen showing you how much ammo was in all your guns. i don't know about you. but it would impact you more (for the limited amount of ammo you have already) if you didn't see a counter for how much ammo you have, if you had to count out every shot fired. like near the end, when he grabs that guy's shotgun from him, it automatically shows 5/6 full of ammo. how's your character suppose to know that?

i remember playing a game a while back, a mod from the half-life engine, something like Blood Opera or something, which was a first person shooter, obviously, but was set like a john woo film. you get perks, and one of them was having the ability to see your ammo stock as you fired. no one who didn't have that perk would see their ammo.

anyway, the point of this was that when i played, i didn't use that particular perk, and actually counted out my bullets that i fired as a result, and it helped plan out strategies for when i should reload, when to take cover, etc.

for a game where ammo was so scarce and limited, i think it would be a nice addition to the game.

i mean during the fight, i actually saw joel's ammo at 0/6 when he tried to fire his gun. which lead to the brick to the head thing from ellie. and i was like "why are you firing, i can see there's no ammo left."

kinda took me out of it.

Seems super cool. But maybe over gratuitous. In the E3 demo a guy is killed while begging for his life. Which honestly doesn't happen allot in games. And is sure to ratchet the rating up. But it raises the question of a desensitized audience. Dont misunderstand me, huge gamer. But when a guy is missing a face after saying "No don't-" it leaves a certain bad taste in my mouth.

Sean wrote: "Seems super cool. But maybe over gratuitous. In the E3 demo a guy is killed while begging for his life. Which honestly doesn't happen allot in games. And is sure to ratchet the rating up. But it ra..."

I remember playing one of the Syphon Filter games (2, maybe?) where you infiltrated a bioweapons lab and had to kill all of the scientists. If you didn't shoot them while they were still running around frantically, you'd have to shoot them while they were on their knees, hands on their heads, saying, "Please don't kill me!" Which was, yeah, a little awkward.

Yeah. The Last of Us looks great. It's one of the reasons that I'm thinking of shifting away from Microsoft again. I mean sure, the Xboxes have great exclusives themselves. But so does Sony.