Month: June 2020

Naughty Dog just released The Last of Us Part II on PlayStation 4, and it could be the developer’s final game for the console. The team will presumably shift to the PlayStation 5 for its next game, whether that be The Last of Us Part II, a new IP, or something else entirely. Naughty Dog VP Neil Druckmann has now spoken about the PS5 and what it will allow the developer to achieve.

In an appearance on former Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aime’s new podcast, Druckmann said the PS5’s new SSD will help cut down on load times, which will in turn open new doors for Naughty Dog’s developers.

Druckmann pointed out that Naughty Dog already works hard to minimize loading zones in its games, but this is only possible due to technical wizardry happening behind the scenes that the player never sees. With the PS5, developers won’t need to be as crafty, Druckmann teased.

“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,” Druckmann said. “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,” he added. “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 opens for us.”

Naughty Dog won’t be jumping into a PS5 game right away, it seems, as Druckmann confirmed that he and the team are taking a break and catching their breath after releasing The Last of Us Part II.

During this same podcast, Druckmann spoke about the internet hate surrounding The Last of Us Part II, saying that hatred and vitriol is unavoidable when you make something that is massively popular.

Naughty Dog’s next game is expected to be a standalone Last of Us Part II online experience of some kind. Given the timing, it seems possible that this project–whatever it might be–may debut on PS5. Almost nothing is known about this Last of Us game, however. Naughty Dog is unexpected to return to Uncharted, as the studio said Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy were the final games in the series they planned to work on. However, a different studio could come in to make Uncharted 5.

Druckmann also recently confirmed that Naughty Dog has no plans to release story DLC for The Last of Us Part II.

The Last of Us Part II sold more than 4 million copies over its first three days to set new records at PlayStation, outpacing other exclusives like Spider-Man, God of War, and Uncharted 4.

For more on The Last of Us Part II, check out editor Phil Hornshaw’s recent opinion piece, “The Last Of Us 2’s Obsession With A Gamer Gotcha Undermines Its Characters.”

Seven years after the release of the original, The Last of Us Part II is finally out now on PlayStation 4. Even before release, writer-director Neil Druckmann acknowledged that some fans of the first game would dislike the sequel, and now that the game is out, he’s responded to more of the internet hate.

Speaking on former Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aime’s podcast, Druckmann said it’s worthless to fight against people when they share their opinions about a game–whether it be good or bad. However, Druckmann said he can’t understand how people get so worked up and upset about fictional characters.

“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,” Druckmann said. “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 really awful, vile stuff because of a fictional character she’s playing in the game,” Druckmann added. “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.”

Also in the interview, Druckmann said he’s been speaking with Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin about this topic. They are currently working together on the HBO TV version 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,” Druckmann said. “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.”

Despite some portion of the audience disliking The Last of Us Part II, the game broke PlayStation’s sales records with 4 million copies sold in its first three days.

Like many creative endeavors, not everything that was planned for Red Dead Redemption 2 made it into the game. The studio already spoke about how five hours of content was cut, and now the actors who play Dutch and Arthur Morgan have shared more insight on the content that was cut from the game.

Speaking to GameSpot, Arthur Morgan actor Roger Clark said Rockstar decided to cut one mission involving Arthur and Dutch. We don’t know the full context of the scene, but Morgan said it involved an action sequence on a train. “There was one that got cut that was kind of fun where we take out some Boston bounty hunters on a train,” he said.

Benjamin Byron Davis, who plays Dutch, said of this mission: “We spent a lot of time on that. That was going to be … oh, I hate that that got cut. It got cut because I guess they couldn’t get it up to snuff.”

Clark said Rockstar isn’t afraid to cut content if it doesn’t live up to the studio’s goalposts. “That’s the thing–you’ve got to be willing to kill your babies. You can’t put everything in,” he said.

Davis said he’s happy in the end. “I do my best not to want what I don’t have. I don’t know that I need another mission with Arthur and Dutch,” he said.

Davis alluded to how this mission was not the only one to be left on the cutting room floor.

“When you’re working with Rockstar, you really never need to worry. Because anything that doesn’t work, they don’t use it,” he said. “The amount of good things that they let go of is … well, that’s too much information.”

Also during our interview, Davis spoke about how we was over the moon when he got the call to return as Dutch after the first game. Dutch’s role in the first game was much smaller, and Davis didn’t originally envision a future for the character.

“The first one was such an amazing experience, and in a lot of ways, it was a dream come true because I had been a gamer and I had a sense that actors were part of how these things were put together and I thought it looked like a good gig,” he said. “But I didn’t really realize when we were doing the first one how amazing it was going to be. I didn’t understand the full scope of Dutch as a character.”

“So when it was over, I was hopeful that I would get a phone call to come back but it wasn’t a guarantee and they certainly … there hadn’t been plans when we did the original to do that. So when I got that call, I was about as excited as I could be about anything except for the fact that I couldn’t tell anybody I was doing it.”

Davis also shared that, on the first Red Dead, the total time he spent on the project was about six months. This included a week or two of performance capture and three hours in the voice over booth. For the sequel–which is a prequel– Dutch’s character was expanded to become one of the central figures. This required a lot of work. Davis said he did three times the amount of work on Red Dead Redemption 2 in the first week alone than he did for the entirety of the first game.

“So I booked the job, and when I finally signed the contracts and they sent me the first 100 pages of the script that I had to memorize, I was both excited–I had to get to work–but then I also became a bit intimidated because I was so proud of the first one,” he said. “I honestly had some fears about, ‘What if we can’t do better?’ I shared those fears with our director Rod Edge on the first day of performance capture, and he put me right at ease and said, ‘We’re gonna do better than the first one.’ And I think he was right.”

You can check out GameSpot’s full interview with Clark, Davis, and Sadie Adler actress Alex McKenna in the video above.

GameSpot’s Play For All–a celebration of all things gaming–is ongoing. Join us as we bring you the summer’s hottest news, previews, interviews, features, and videos, as well as raise money for COVID-19 relief efforts and Black Lives Matter with the help of our friends from around the gaming world. Check out the Play For All schedule for more.

In one of the year’s bigger NFL offseason moves, the New England Patriots have signed former Carolina Panthers QB Cam Newton to fill the void after Tom Brady left for the Buccaneers.

We’ve yet to see Newton in a real Patriots jersey, so EA Sports has stepped in to show the athlete in his new jersey in Madden NFL 21. It’s shocking to see someone other than Tom Brady leading the Patriots, but change is the only constant, and a new era of football in New England is about to begin.

As it happens, Newton isn’t technically confirmed to be the new Patriots QB for this year. He needs to beat out Jarrett Stidham and Brian Hoyer, the Patriots QBs who are currently leading the team during practices. Newton is expected to be the starting QB on opening day–after all, the Patriots are paying him $7.5 million USD for just one year.

As for Madden NFL 21, the professional football game is scheduled for release in late August on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. It will be released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X when those systems release this holiday.

A closed beta test for Madden NFL 21 is coming up soon, and here’s how you can sign up.

First impressions of Cyberpunk 2077 have started rolling in after a number of journalists spent time with a demo of the upcoming CD Projekt game. However only IGN’s preview seems to have unearthed a very important feature of the game: that you can, in fact, pet the cat.

The preview unfortunately didn’t go into too much detail on whether there is just a single, pettable cat to be found, or whether multiple are dispersed throughout the game, but it’s still a big improvement on The Witcher 3’s disappointingly Witcher-averse cats. Whether dogs are present or pettable in Cyberpunk 2077 still has yet to be seen.

While “can you pet the dog?” has long been an important question in video game criticism, inspired by the Twitter account of the same name, cats are only just starting to get the same kind of recognition in virtual petting.

If you have more non-cat-related questions about Cyberpunk 2077, check out Tamoor Hussain’s preview of some of the game’s smaller stories, or Edmond Tran’s investigation of cyberpunk themes in the Cyberpunk 2077 demo.

The game has unfortunately been delayed again–first scheduled for April, then pushed back to September, Cyberpunk 2077 is now scheduled for a November 19 release on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. CD Projekt Red has also promised that these versions of the game will be playable on next-gen consoles PS5 and Xbox Series X thanks to a free update.

The remake of Destroy All Humans is due to release for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on July 26, and ahead of its launch publisher THQ Nordic has released a new trailer showing off one of the game’s locations. The level in question is Santa Modesta, which is the game’s third level, if it follows the exact same structure as the 2005 original.

The trailer shows protagonist Crypto running through town, attacking humans with various alien rays, blowing up cars, and piloting a spacecraft to exact further havoc on the townsfolk.

The game’s environmental destruction is also showcased, as you’ll see entire buildings exploding in the trailer below. It certainly looks more technically impressive than the original game.

You can check out the remake ahead of release through a demo on GOG. The $400 special edition, including a 23-inch statue of Crypto, is still available to pre-order.

GameSpot’s Play For All–a celebration of all things gaming–is ongoing. Join us as we bring you the summer’s hottest news, previews, interviews, features, and videos, as well as raise money for COVID-19 relief efforts and Black Lives Matter with the help of our friends from around the gaming world. Check out the Play For All schedule for more.