Naughty Dog: The Last of Us will provide “an experience unlike anything else in the industry”

[Reasonable]

Rainbird said:

Reasonable said:

He means they think they're going to delivery characterisation and narrative that is deeper and different than anything else in the industry - and given almost all games have shallow, weak characterisation the bar they need to jump isn't that high.  In fact arguably the bar this gen for those elements has been set by ND themselves.

I hope ND will accomplish this, but I fear they will go the Uncharted-route of making the game extremely linear to accomplish it. It's still early days of course, but I'll remain unexcited until I see that ND can deliver high quality story telling without locking the player into a very strict path.

That's probably true and the price to pay.  No open world has come close to handling narrative (and I include RDR, GTA, Skyrim and others in that statement).  Open world means loss of narrative flow and character cohesion (although I do think there are ways this could be improved) at the moment.

My expectation would be somewhat open, freeform encoutners along a structured narrative.

Which suits me.  I love narrative in books/films and while I wouldn't want it in all games I do want it in some and ND are among few developers able to deliver at the moment in this area.