The Last of Us Remake's Approach To Realism Is Its Biggest Problem

The Last of Us remake and the discourse surrounding it is mighty tiring. Largely because the game doesn’t need to exist and is a damning indictment of how creatively bankrupt our industry has become. What was once hailed as a new milestone for what this medium is capable of has become a golden goose for Naughty Dog to return to time and time again instead of pursuing new ideas. It's an ironic twist of fate, and one that stinks of corporate suits in search of safe profits from an audience who is willing to put up with such bullshit.

But it’s coming, and there is sadly nothing we can do about it. The debut trailer didn’t feature any actual gameplay, so we’re unable to tell whether the combat and movement systems have changed dramatically or the level design has been altered to accommodate these adjustments. All we have to go on right now is cutscenes. Lots and lots of super-duper realistic cutscenes with characters who now look older, more rugged, and more lifelike.

You can’t deny that it looks fantastic, but in shooting for a more realistic rendition of these characters - especially ones who weren’t present in the sequel like Tess - the upcoming remake removes much of the graphical flair that made it so special in the first place. Colours are significantly more muted, facial structure is changed to an extent that some characters are almost unrecognisable, and vocal performances are twisted into something they were never intended to be through new facial capture that will dilute the original emotional resonance. For a game praised primarily for its storytelling and character development, altering this feels like a mistake with little foresight on how it will be received.

Increased realism isn’t the problem, though - it’s the reasoning behind it and how that somehow improves what we had before. The Last of Us is a masterpiece, and almost a decade later is still seen as a high watermark. Now Naughty Dog is coming along and declaring it as inferior, that for some reason the entire experience needs to be remade from the ground-up to meet standards that have materialised from nowhere. It’s trying desperately to fix something that isn’t broken, or update the series’ lineage, so this predecessor sits neatly alongside the sequel as a prestige product.

We’ve seen a similar jump in photorealism from Naughty Dog before, which is why I’m not fully on board with people believing the original game’s personality has been sucked out. This is still going to be a melancholic post-apocalyptic adventure with slithers of light shining through the darkness, and no amount of autumnal hues are going to change that. I also imagine the seasonal structure of the campaign will remain untouched, making use of ray-tracing and HDR to an extent that just wasn’t possible back in 2013. But that won’t alleviate the negativity that comes from facial capture that misconstrues performances and risks ruining moments that for years now we’ve all committed to memory.

It’s similar to the jump seen from Uncharted 3 to Uncharted 4. A relatively cartoony adventure with character models and a narrative to reflect that tone, was morphed into a realistic blockbuster with a deeper, more consequential story and visuals that felt real at the time. It still looks stunning, and The Last of Us Part 2 would build upon its technology in equally groundbreaking ways. Now we’ve come full circle, with this very same graphical style being applied to The Last of Us and therefore abandoning the last vestiges of playful innocence that Naughty Dog has held onto since its inception. Now it’s all about realism, murder, and characters being really, really sad all the time. Thanks for that, Neil.

Where does Naughty Dog even go from here, and will it ever have the creative discipline to leave The Last of Us behind and stop declaring its magnum opus as an inferior product in the face of rising standards that will never stop changing? The Last of Us remake, which is being pitched as the definitive version of this story, will soon be outdated itself, and we’ll be drawn into the same song and dance all thanks to those who enabled it in the first place. I don’t think striving for increased realism is a bad thing, and will likely make this remake a better game when all is said and done, but in applying these unreasonable standards to a game with a fundamentally different aesthetic from a distant generation feels not only unnecessary, but foolish in how Naughty Dog’s self-proclaimed hubris shines through above everything else. This isn’t how we move forward, quite the opposite.

The conversation right now isn’t about Joel and Ellie’s adventure being reborn on a new platform and the benefits that might bring, but on the necessity of declaring what was considered by millions as a work of art as irrelevant. I don’t know where we will go from here, but the fact I’m having to write an article like this highlighting such nonsense is a stark sign of where we are right now and how the industry really needs to take a good look at itself.

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