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The Last Of Us Pt 1 remake review: Higher-fidelity blood, sweat, and tears
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
This just about describes the gaming industry these days....
Remake everything, even if it's less than 10 years old...
Remake everything, even if it's less than 10 years old...
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This costing $70 is still making it a no go for me. Sounds like it would be worth grabbing during the winter sales at $40-50.
This is a Nintendo level of milking a remake, and unlike Skyward Sword there was a perfectly decent way to play this already on current hardware.
Edit: It's obvious that the game itself is great and the remaster pretty excellent. I just don't like the pricing to be clear.
This is a Nintendo level of milking a remake, and unlike Skyward Sword there was a perfectly decent way to play this already on current hardware.
Edit: It's obvious that the game itself is great and the remaster pretty excellent. I just don't like the pricing to be clear.
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I played it first on PS3, then again on PS4 (thanks to PS+ free game), I don't feel the need to play it on PS5 (if I ever get my hand on one).
Is TLOU, Sony's Skyrim?
Is TLOU, Sony's Skyrim?
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They probably did this because of the TV show. They expect it'll bring in new players fresh to the franchise and want a good opportunity to cash in on that.
It's not really for existing players, IMHO.
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I had this thought too at first, but it’s so far from the actual show releasing. I would’ve thought the timing would be better to coincide closer to the show.
My guess this was Sony and Naughty Dogs attempt at figuring out the ps5 for another unannounced game, or perhaps in preparation for TLOU live service game announced.
I’m just hoping for a similar remaster for TLOU 2 (which has to be happening, right? It’d be weird for Sony not to). I’d love to replay both of these games again.
My only complaint is the price. $70 is pretty steep. Still having loading screens is also a bummer. If they’re going to release a fully remade for ps5 upgrade, make it truly feel that way.
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>It is the best version yet of an easily recommended PlayStation-exclusive adventure
There's a PC version on the way; so worth holding off if that's your thing.
There's a PC version on the way; so worth holding off if that's your thing.
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I'm still amazed that Sony had the audacity to pull this shit. A full-priced remake of a remake that you can still play on the current system is a really bad look. Especially while Microsoft is banking hard on free upgrades to past generation games. You can tell how complacent current day SIE is getting with their market leader position.
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If that is true, it has not been announced. Are you trolling, brand-new commenter, or are you leaking? (Or are you mixing this up with an upcoming PC port of the Uncharted series?)
EDIT: I somehow missed this news, yeesh. My apologies, commenter! Naughty Dog confirmed that a PC port is coming during a Summer Games Fest-adjacent announcement, and one staffer tweeted the following: "PC version should come out a bit later, but very soon after the PS5 release!" Source: https://twitter.com/JonathanBenaino/sta ... 6965758976
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To clarify: TLOU Pt. 1's loading screens when booting from cold or loading checkpoints from different chapters are incredibly brief, as is common with native PS5 software. My review mentions gameplay sequences that were originally used to MASK the loading times of the PS3. Those have been left untouched, when they are clearly unnecessary, as proven by the blips of loading (sometimes instant, sometimes 1-2 seconds) elsewhere in the package.
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I'd always heard of this experience but never played it so I'm shocked to learn they fell back on FMVs. Seriously? SEGA went out of their way to render everything in real-time for Shenmue so I just imagined that would have been standard practice by 2013 for big titles.
Also, I don't know if it's because I'm using a regular monitor but all of the screenshots from the new version are incredibly dark. Even the menu shots are almost illegible. Ironically, from my normal reading distance, the word "ACCESSIBILITY" is nigh invisible, even when viewing the larger images in the gallery.
Also, I don't know if it's because I'm using a regular monitor but all of the screenshots from the new version are incredibly dark. Even the menu shots are almost illegible. Ironically, from my normal reading distance, the word "ACCESSIBILITY" is nigh invisible, even when viewing the larger images in the gallery.
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Ah, awesome. Thanks for the clarification! Those don’t bother me. I’ve been replaying God of War (2018) in preparation for Ragnarok, which has a lot of those sequences. Those don’t bother me at all.
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It's still amazing today to think about what they managed to pull on a platform with only half a gig of RAM.
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It has been announced. I think they mentioned it when it this game was announced but no release date yet. Check out the end of the launch trailer for recent confirmation.
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Yep. Was about to say the same thing.
Link for convenience
Can’t say I won’t pick this up on a deep sale some day, but TLoU isn’t really a game I’m in any hurry to replay (simply too unrelentingly bleak) and the Remastered PS4 version runs great on my PS5 anyway. Yes, this unquestionably looks better, but $70 just for graphics (and an admittedly outstanding accessibility mode) doesn’t seem worth it to me without some deeper changes to the underlying core gameplay.
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SuinusLatinus
Ars Tribunus Militum
It has been announced for quite a while:
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-last-of-us- ... ing-to-pc/
(first link on a duck duck go search I made just now for Last of Us PC)
Edit: double ninja'd!
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I can suspend my belief in reality to accept zombies but I'm having a tough time believing Diesel can be that much cheaper than Gas
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256MB of RAM actually, which makes it even more incredible. The 360 is the one that had 512MB.
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Some time ago youtube on infinite play brought up the voice actors playing the game.
Adding in case there is interest.
Troy, Nolan & Hana play TLOU
Adding in case there is interest.
Troy, Nolan & Hana play TLOU
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Split the difference. The 360 had a unified memory system with 512 MB of RAM. The PS3 was designed to ship without a GPU at all with the Cell handling graphics duties, but it wasn't up to the task so it had a GPU added very late in its design. That meant the PS3 had PC-style non-unified RAM with 512 MB of TOTAL RAM, but it was divided into two pools of 256 MB each, one for the Cell and one for the GPU.
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Not quite. The PS3 had a non-unified split of 256MB of main memory and 256MB of video memory, while the Xbox 360 had a unified memory architecture of 512MB.
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As someone who has not played any of the TLOU-releases yet, I am quite excited for the PC-release of this new remake. I've heard plenty of good things about the story, the screenshots look just gorgeous and...well, zombies are kind of (one of) my jam(s).
If only I had a firm release date to look forward to. It's really quite frustrating to have only a "sometime between now and some day in the future!"
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There are many reasons why a developer might choose to rely on FMVs vs real-time rendered graphics.
The character models may not be rigged finely enough to convey the particular emotion or drama of a scene: eg main skeleton, fingers/toes, facial bones, clothing, hair. Or it may not be detailed enough (polygon count, textures, lighting). Many games do substitute a higher-def model for close-ups and cutscenes, but then that model also has to be imported into the engine, and the engine itself might not support all the bones, polygons and splines you want to use for the scene.
Then the environment itself might also have to be tweaked for the scene. This includes camera placement (and your intended camera FOV, positioning and movement might unmask shortcomings in the game environment like clipped planes, missing ceiling textures or polygons, muddy textures, etc). Environmental and lighting effects like dust motes, sun rays, haze, etc might be easier to render as a 2D compositing mask than rendering it in real time.
And there's also the animation of the scene and the characters. If you're using mo-cap performance, the game engine might not have the same fidelity to capture, reproduce and tweak animations as your capture/render pass, or Blender/Maya/etc for hand rendered and animated assets. Animating everything in-engine could end up producing a very Machinima-like result.
Lastly, there's the issue of talents and teams. The character animation team might not be the same people as the FMV/story team, and they could have different skillsets and proficiencies. The two teams might not be co-located, or working on different schedules, are probably both overworked to begin with.
That's not to say developers can't produce great results with real-time animation, rendering, and scenes. The facial animation, character animation, and subtle tics of the characters in The Quarry is amazing. But that's also an adventure game rather than an open-world (ish) action-adventure with much larger levels.
People won't accept Shenmue-level cinematics in 2022, and while there is a gradation of levels between Dreamcast/PS1 animations and AAA Hollywood level cg (which can be pre-rendered or realtime, cf Mandalorian), the studio may decide to pick the best option that suits their schedule, vision, budget and capabilities.
Don't get me wrong, I am impressed whenever a studio pulls off amazing real-time rendered cutscenes. But it's no easy task, and I've also seen many examples of attempts that broke suspension of disbelief because they were overambitious or just too reckless.
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Nah, this is how it's always been. As one example, Final Fantasy IV has been re-released no less than 21 times over the years, including multiple remakes. There's always been money in offering a combination of incremental ports and incremental remakes of popular games.
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As someone who only recently completed this game for the very first time (and felt compelled to complete an additional two playthroughs immediately after, and on a PS3 no less), the idea of playing it again with a graphical and gameplay upgrade is tantalizing.
Alas, there are three issues for me:
1. On a PS3, the game plays, sounds, and looks fantastic. I don't feel as if I'm 'missing' anything, the way I do with an older Blu-Ray when a 4K remaster is released. Yes, it is evident that it's an older game, but it still looks and sounds great on my home setup. So much so, that I played it three times back to back - rarely have I experienced such compelling immersion in a game, a near-compulsion to return and remain with those characters.
2. I don't have a PS5.
3. If I had a PS5, I'd likely wait a while until the cost feels reasonable. In fact, most of my game purchases are made long after release, as there are so many compelling games to play across platform generations. My gameplay time is limited, so I carefully pick and choose where to invest. Arkham City was a blast, which I only completed during the pandemic, and I picked it up for just a few bucks.
Just my thoughts.
Alas, there are three issues for me:
1. On a PS3, the game plays, sounds, and looks fantastic. I don't feel as if I'm 'missing' anything, the way I do with an older Blu-Ray when a 4K remaster is released. Yes, it is evident that it's an older game, but it still looks and sounds great on my home setup. So much so, that I played it three times back to back - rarely have I experienced such compelling immersion in a game, a near-compulsion to return and remain with those characters.
2. I don't have a PS5.
3. If I had a PS5, I'd likely wait a while until the cost feels reasonable. In fact, most of my game purchases are made long after release, as there are so many compelling games to play across platform generations. My gameplay time is limited, so I carefully pick and choose where to invest. Arkham City was a blast, which I only completed during the pandemic, and I picked it up for just a few bucks.
Just my thoughts.
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They wouldn't be doing it, if they didn't make a profit out of it. The fact that they're making a profit out of it quite obviously entails that there are enough people buying the remakes to make it profitable.
I mean, they may not be to your liking, but there are a lot of people who buy them, whether it is someone like e.g. me, who hasn't played any of the earlier releases, or if it's someone who just enjoys the nostalgia or whatever other reason.
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Hasn't Sony basically come out with the 'All PS games will be coming to PC at some point'?
Maybe not with the speed MS is doing it but even without seeing any kind of announcement my first thought was just as that poster's; this is eventually hitting the PC so at least graphically it'll be the best version.
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Yeah, I recently picked up a Series S and have been playing some of the Gears 3 and other Xbox 360 games, and it's damn remarkable how much they were accomplishing with those specs. I feel like the gap between Gears 3 and Gears 4 is much, much less than you'd think given the hardware leap.
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
Whee, I'm no longer under an NDA about this!
This seems like the perfect way for Naughty Dog to get their feet wet on the PS5... it's a safe tech demo, for all practical purposes, and if it also happens to be a good remake of one of the best games ever made... cool!
(Seriously though, Naughty Dog has some fantastically talented people working on their games. Ars had a great War Story about their early days working on Crash Bandicoot... obviously the company is different than it was then, but their technical prowess with Sony consoles has been a reoccurring theme)
This seems like the perfect way for Naughty Dog to get their feet wet on the PS5... it's a safe tech demo, for all practical purposes, and if it also happens to be a good remake of one of the best games ever made... cool!
(Seriously though, Naughty Dog has some fantastically talented people working on their games. Ars had a great War Story about their early days working on Crash Bandicoot... obviously the company is different than it was then, but their technical prowess with Sony consoles has been a reoccurring theme)
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I wasn't really looking forward to this, having played the remaster, but after reading I may just give this a shot once I can get a PS5 (probably wait until PS5 Pro to come out). I just revisited AC Origins with Game Pass and was suprised how much better it looked on the XBox one X than I remember it being on my PC (only had a GTX 970 at the time).
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
It makes total sense for Sony... once a game's release cycle is over and it sales start to taper off, you can give the title a shot in the arm by re-releasing for PC. At that point, anyone who was going to buy a PlayStation for it probably did, and there's no reason to leave money on the table (and it's not a bad way to win some hearts and minds in the PC gaming crowd)
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I'm looking forward to a PC release. I don't have a TV (or a PS5), and my computer monitors are not very conducive to running consoles (2x 34" ultrawide G-Sync displays), so a native PC version would suit my use case better. I almost got the PS streaming service just to be able to stream the PS3 version of TLOU, but glad I waited (or procrastinated) it out.
Glad to hear that they've updated some elements (combat, AI), but strange that they left in some others (hiding loading times with long animations). I'm reminded of the difference between Resident Evils 1 & 2 remakes. RE2 remake was a ground up reimagining yet faithful to the memory and experience of the original. Whereas RE1 remake was more of a graphical update that left in a lot of the klunkiness of the original (door loading scenes, fixed camera angles, obtrusive on-screen prompts, janky controls, can I complain about the bad voice acting or is that considered "authenticism"?). The PS5 TLOU seems to be closer to RE2 in execution, but strange that they left in some of the klunkiness that was needed to accommodate PS3 hardware.
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
Shout-out to the lurker who's given every post in this thread a downvote! That's an edgy way to make your opinion known.
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