The Last Guardian vs The Last of Us

[siebensus4]

I have a book about TLG (The Last Guardian - An extraordinary Story, ISBN 978-3869930800), which explains many of the misunderstandings regarding this game.

For example: Development
Actually, the title was hardly in development between 2011 and 2014. Fumito Ueda left Sony 2011 and founded genDESIGN 2014. Here is the reason, why TLG could not be released on PS3 as planned:
"The structure and flow of the level disign was actually fixed and completed on PlayStation 3 (along with the puzzles and functioning AI), though there were issues with the game running out of memory and not hitting the targeted 30 frames per second, and the game could only be completed by pulling up a debug menu to change levels (rather than the seamless interconnected experience we see in the final game). The cutscenes didn't exist then either: Tanji [scenario writer at genDESIGN] began helping out with storyboards for them beginning around late 2014."

And more misunderstandings regardings the AI of Trico:
The behavior of Trico (and how good he obeys to the boy's orders) depends on
- how many barrels Trico has eaten
- how quickly you have pulled out the spears out of Trico's body
- and even how much and where (!) you pet it

And then the camera and controls of the boy... I mean, the developers chose the difficult option and put Trico in narrow buildings to underline his height of 6 meters and length of 17 meters. Everyone knows that programming a camera in small rooms is a pain in the ass, but additionally we have a big AI moving in small rooms. That's so damn difficult get a good looking result. Of course you can't get the best cinematic camera angles when you always can move in any direction you want.
I was by the way very impressed by the interaction between the boy and the environment. I have never seen such a good animation of legs and arms touching the environment – almost without clipping. There are so many calculations to be done, and of course this causes an input lag. In fact I have activated the movie mode on my TV to get a smooth 60 fps experience, so I played with an input lag of more than 100ms. It was fine. Maybe sometimes a bit difficult, but OK. So what's the point? Every game has it's own rules.

Some other details many don't notice are:
- the boy has 8 levels of growth of his tattoos (related to how often the boy is grabbed by enemies)
- there are 4 different types of Yoroi (soldiers) during the game
- you can smooth Trico's feathers and clean off the dirt and blood by petting them

And of course you can find many things that were cut during the development process in the book I mentioned above.

The true legacy for the video game industry is of course Trico's AI. Actually you can beat the game almost without giving Trico any commands. I played the first hours without commands – it worked fine. Maybe you need to be a bit patient, but that's something which is pretty hard for some people for various reasons.