Grounded: the making of Last of Us (Research)

I found this documentary to be an interesting insight into the development proses of a new 'triple A' intellectual property. There was a lot of focus on the scale and variety of talents needed for the production, as well as a lot of talk about the difficulty that comes with making something new. I personally took a lot of interest in the small gameplay decisions that Naughty Dog made during development, such as item starving the player during dangerous moments in the narrative in order to make the player feel much more threatened and tense.

I did however find the documentary to also be revealing of a lot of the failings of the sequel, 'The Last of Us part 2'. To name an example, whilst the documentary suggested that everyone on the dev team enjoyed crunch time, this was a major controversy with the company during the production of the sequel, with them seemingly padding out the game with an extra 5 hours of unnecessary content towards the end despite pushing their staff into crunch time. Another point is that whilst Elie's female empowerment was made to be a big point in the documentary, and was done well in the first game, it was clear how that theme evolved into pandering in the second game to the point of it breaking the grounded reality that they had developed. This point namely referring to the concept of a pregnant lady going into active combat as being a show of empowerment instead of irresponsible decision making.

Ultimately when looking at this documentary in hindsight their are a lot of hints towards things that were either questionable from the get go or started out good but became corrupted in the later instalment. Despite this however the documentary itself shed a very optimistic and passionate view into the development of a game that is considered by many to be a masterpiece and I really enjoyed my time watching it.