Neil Druckmann also talked about what the PlayStation 5 will offer the developers.
The director and co-lead writer of The Last of Us Part II chatted with Reggie Fils-Aime, the former president of Nintendo of America. „I think you have to create some separation to say, we made this game, we believe in this game, we’re proud of this game, now it’s out there and it’s like whatever reaction people have–whether they like it or not–that’s fair. That’s their reaction and you don’t fight that. The other thing with the more hateful stuff, the more vile stuff, that’s a little harder. It’s especially harder when I see it happening to team members or cast members who play a particular character in the game.
We have an actor, she’s been getting awful, vile stuff because of a fictional character she’s playing in the game. I just have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. The thing I try to do is just ignore it as much as I can. When things escalate to being serious, there are certain security protocols that we take and I report it to the proper authorities. Then you just try to focus on the positives and focus on distracting yourself with other stuff. But it’s kind of just the reality,” Druckmann said. While he did not name this person, we suspect that it’s possibly Ashley Johnson that receives nasty things due to her character in the game (Ellie) being a lesbian.
Druckmann also revealed that he was talking about it with Craig Mazin, the writer of Chernobyl. They are working together on the HBO TV series adaptation of The Last of Us. „I’ve had a lot of conversations with him about this stuff. He articulated it pretty well, it’s like people have to get educated. This is kind of the cost. When you’re doing something big, and you might disappoint fans, there is a cost to it now. Which is, you’re going to get a certain level of hate, a certain level of vitriol that you just have to deal with. There is no other way to make it go away,” Druckmann said.
He also discussed the evolution in game development that the PlayStation 5 will bring: „At the end of a [console] generation, you always feel the constraints. You always feel like you’re pushing against a bunch of walls and finding the little cracks where you can take things a little further whether it’s memory or CPU or hard drive speed. When you start a new generation, it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have to build new tech for the new hardware, and that can be an uphill battle. But on the other hand, all of a sudden you feel this freedom of, ‘Oh my god, we can breathe again!’ ‘We can break away from these constraints.’ And one of the things that we’re excited by is the solid-state hard drive and what it means for almost seamless loading.
We do so much work, on our end, once you start the adventure, you never see a load screen. And there’s so much work that happens behind the scenes of how we design the levels, how we chop them up, and it’s all invisible to the player; you never see any of that work, but now, knowing that we’re going to be able to load things more quickly, it just means the designers don’t have to be as constrained by how they lay things out. How we think about things. When we load new characters. So I’m excited to see the doors that open for us,” he added. So… are they bringing The Last of Us Part II to the PlayStation 5? The Factions multiplayer mode might not happen.
We wouldn’t be surprised if Sony announces that The Last of Us Part II, which launched on June 19 on PlayStation 4, hit 7 million sales in a day or two…
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