Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann announced at DICE 2018 that they considered the first-person view for The Last of Us video game series, but decided otherwise.
There was a time when Naughty Dog considered the option to use the first-person view for The Last of Us, as TLOU2 co-writer and game director Neil Druckmann revealed during a recent interview at DICE 2018.
In a talk with filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg (known for his work on thriller 10 Cloverfield Lane), Druckmann disclosed that at a certain point in the development process Naughty Dog prototyped a first-person mode for the post-apocalyptic action adventure.
The close-camera that was actually adopted with the third person view was a result of such prototyping, as Naughty Dog decided it would be a better fit to stick with what they were able to do in the first place while capturing the “intimacy” of a first-person perspective.
Interestingly, Druckmann noted that the first person camera is not ruled out at all for future Naughty Dog works, at “the next game from Naughty Dog could be first-person.” He even joked about what the outcome of that project would be, some kind of “Naughty Dog Half-Life game (…) it would look awesome.”
From what we know so far, we can safely say The Last of Us Part II is not going to adopting a first-person camera, and it looks like the game director was suggesting something like a completely different series from the already existing ones for such experiment.
Though, to be honest, Half-Life seems quite a good fit for the kind of games Naughty Dog has used us to deliver. Not to say Valve could offer the developer the license to build a new title in the series, of course, but it looks a good example of what could be an ND first-person game.
