The Last Of Us will continue to be “different” from the game, showrunners warn
Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann emphasize the importance of diverging from The Last Of Us gameplay while writing the HBO series
Aux News The Last Of Us
The Last Of Us is looking forward to the future. HBO’s hit series concluded its first season on Sunday, experiencing unprecedented levels of success for a video game adaptation. Still, even though the post-apocalyptic drama held major crossover appeal, some fans of the original game still wish it would have been a little more faithful to the source material, particularly when it comes to the action.
Co-creator Craig Mazin addressed this and other concerns during a virtual press conference last week (per Variety). “Ultimately, we generally stressed the power of relationships and trying to find significance within moments of action,” he said. “And so there may be less action than some people wanted because we couldn’t necessarily find significance for quite a bit of it, or [there was] concern that it would be repetitive. After all, you’re not playing it, you’re watching it. And although a lot of people do like to watch gameplay, it needs to be a little more focused and purposeful when we’re putting it on TV.”
The body count for The Last Of Us television series is pretty high, but even co-creator Neil Druckmann (who wrote the game) admits that the game’s body count is “much higher than we would want for the show.” He noted that if an action sequence “doesn’t move character, and it was only there for spectacle, it was an easy cut for us.”
That doesn’t mean there won’t be spectacle in the second season: “There is more The Last Of Us to come. It’s quite possible that there will be a lot more infected later. And perhaps different kinds,” Mazin hinted during the press conference. He went on to say, “We will present things, but it will be different, just as this season was different. Sometimes it will be different radically, and sometimes it will be barely different at all, but it’s going to be different. It will be its own thing. It won’t be exactly like the game. It will be the show that Neil and I want to make.”
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I hope they make it even more sapphic than Part II already was. It really pissed off a certain kind of people to my amusement.
Oh you’re gonna love Dina.
Yup make it gayer and lets watch the meltdown! I literally saw a comment on reddit praise Part 2 but not recommend it for having “too much gay stuff”
It’s hilarious how scared some fans get that the thing they inflated in their head might not be presented exactly as they imagined. If you put that much significance on a story you did not write, you need to get a life of your own.
seemed to be the majority of criticisms. The only complaint I had about the show was the finale, with two major beats/moments seemingly playing out better in the game due to its pacing, the original actors’ work and ultimately the medium itself: going through the hospital scene instead of watching it has the dissonant effect that can’t be replicated in a show.
I haven’t seen a lot of criticisms online, but everyone I’ve discussed the show with has had criticisms about the world building, pacing, or character development. I suppose a lot of these things are changes from the game, but only one of these people has played the game, so that didn’t really feature. I have not played the game. Nor do I play these kinds of games, generally. But my partner is a game designer so I hear a lot about how games try too hard to be like movies vs using the actual game mechanics in an interesting way, of which TLOU is a prime example.
That’s a great point. The whole choice to save Ellie was totally rushed in the show. My partner who never played the game totally missed that plot beat. “Why is he killing everyone?” She basically looked at her phone for a few moments when Marlene was laying out the reality to Joel, and the biggest “moment” of the show flew by without her noticing. Weird call by the showrunners.
Lots of weird TLOU Part 1 fans formed a parasocial relationship with the characters, especially Joel (explaining why they took a certain event in Part 2 so personally).
A fan’s opinion only matters if they wrote the story themselves is a really weird take.
The only value a fan’s opinion holds, or should hold, is their personal choice about whether or not they spend their time consuming said media. A fan’s voice shouldn’t factor into the creation of art, in my opinion. That’s how you get Marvel movies, which aren’t art (also my opinion so don’t bother losing your mind), but just commercial bullshit wrapped in CGI. I’d rather let art be created by artists and not by the toxic hive mind of fandom.
It wasn’t as different as I thought it would be, aside from the random game stuff where you run into infected or some shit. The body count for The Last Of Us television series is pretty high, but even co-creator Neil Druckmann (who wrote the game) admits that the game’s body count is “much higher than we would want for the show.” He noted that if an action sequence “doesn’t move character, and it was only there for spectacle, it was an easy cut for us.”That’s good. I liked the second game, but it had a bit of the ludonarrative dissonance thing going on where it was about the toll of violence – but then you spend the game brutally murdering nameless soldiers and infected. This will bring it more into line, thematically.
It is though. A lot less infected. We only saw one bloater this season.Also less of the improvised weapons. I was looking forward to seeing Joel create that improvised gas/propane mini flame-thrower.
I want him to quickly cure his terrible abdominal injury by wrapping his forearm with a bandage.
Maybe next season. We did get a few Stealth Kills (which made me chuckle when they showed up on-screen, like Ellie stabbing two clickers in their necks).
The bloater and that swarm was also the last appearance of any infected in the story proper. After episode 5, there aren’t anymore for the rest of the season. That’s kind of crazy to think about. The one Clicker in ep 7 and the one Runner in ep 9 are both only flashbacks.
where it was about the toll of violence – but then you spend the game brutally murdering nameless soldiers and infected.It’s the same picture. There’s no contradiction here.
Actaully, they made a big point about how they weren’t nameless soldiers anymore. Now you were killing Johnny! or Nick!
I’m pretty glad they’re diverging from the game. We had over a decade of the Walking Dead, Army of the Dead, World War Z, etc etc so frankly I’m a little burnt out on heavily-zombie-focused narratives. If I just wanted to see Joel fighting zombies week after week, I’d just play the game.
I also am hoping they diverge in season2 from just making TLOU2 because they’ll run out of material pretty fast.
The problem with it, and I really like the show, is that’s it’s not different from the game enough. They take scenes that are already great in the game and just redo them on the show. I don’t blame them, but I wish they had reimagined them a bit more. I do appreciate that they tweaked the characters a smidge so that who they are/where they are in season two makes more sense. My main complaint is the show, somehow, felt a little rushed getting to the infamous first game’s ending. I could’ve used more bonding stuff between the mains…both who are fantastic. The second game, in my opinion, is the smarter of the two games. Meatier. More complex, certainly. So it’ll give them more opportunities to diverge a bit. Plus, sounds like they won’t be trying to cram it into one season, which is good.
some fans of the original game still wish it would have been a little more faithful to the source material, particularly when it comes to the action.This just proves you can’t make every gamer happy. I mean, it’s a fairly faithful adaption already, I think the showrunners have earned the opportunity to add in a few of their own ideas.
I guess those CGI remakes of Disney movies made billions of dollars, so there’s clearly a market for people wanting to see a story “adapted” into the same story. But it does invite the question “why?” Especially because they’re going to rerelease The Last of Us on every gaming platform for the next decade.(I’m not complaining about that last bit – I never got a chance to play it, so I’m pretty excited it’s coming out on PC this month.)
TBF Gamers just suck. Games are awesome. Heck I have found that tv and film twitter and websites have had smarter and better thought out articles about this show and the games than actual video game sites.I find that Gamers just don’t have very good empathy. They play as characters but refuse to actually interact and empathise with them.
I mostly agree that gamers suck, but then we get something like Halo that shits all over the source material so on the rare occasion gamers can be right about these things.
Ive just deleted it from my mind lol. That was deservedly dragged. I wonder if S2 will learn from it’s mistakes.
I know I’m never going to see this but I’m actually more interested to see what was happening with all those passenger aeroplanes coming in low and fast in tight formation from Episode 1 as well as what was going on at the airport after they landed than anything else.I’ve always been appreciative of the skill of the thousands of people or more who keep us safe in the air and a long time ago, a book called Down to a Sunless Sea made me aware that no matter how sudden a disaster is (in the case of this book it was nuclear war), there’s always going to be hundreds if not more planes in the air all over the world where people boarded when the world was functioning before it suddenly was not.I would really like to see how all these people handled the immediate crisis to getting people to the ground (from the pilots to cabin crew in the air and air traffic control on the ground and numerous others) and what happened next because I could see most of them staying at their posts until they got everyone on land at least.Which I know is a whole different story and not this one so we won’t ever see it here but just wanted to say that it’s always been one that fascinates me in apocalypse fiction.
I don’t specifically remember that moment from the first episode, but I’d imagine that a lot of the planes in the air were having passengers becoming fungal zombies and attacking other passengers (since the outbreak was something that had been silently building up and suddenly broke out all over the place) so the pilots were probably trying to get the planes on the ground to get help. Of course, they’d just be landing into the same mess they had going on so it would just be a total shit show all around.
It’s the part where Sarah puts her hands over her ears in the back of the car as a passenger plane goes overhead very loudly as it comes in low, hard and fast. I think I saw three in total in a very close formation and that was the lead one.The one that crashes behind them had to have been a fourth one further back as the first three did pass overhead and beyond them.As I said, I imagine in spite of everything going on, the crews in the air as well as Air Traffic Control would have been professional to the end (episode after episode of Air Crash Investigation/May Day prove that) and I would have liked to have seen what happened up to those that made it to the emergency landings and then security and police along with everyone else at the airport.
“no matter how sudden a disaster…there’s always going to be hundreds if not more planes in the air all over the world where people boarded when the world was functioning before it suddenly was not…it’s always been one that fascinates me in apocalypse fiction.”SAME. The shock of hitting that upon one’s return to ‘safe’ terra firma, even if one had hints during a flight; like landing, and realizing/inferring potentially very bad news about family in the same second realizing every stranger around you is in exactly the same boat…but some are technically home, and some never will reach theirs.
Great! Now what’re the odds that I can play a PC port of TLOU2 before the next season drops?