A narrative designer on The Last of Us has discussed how a simple gameplay change transformed the tone of the game's ending.

As part of his talk at Develop conference in Brighton on 'Giving Back Control: The Last of Us and Telling Stories in Gameplay', Peter Field discussed the the game's final hands-on section, which takes place after Joel has rescued Ellie from the Firefly hospital.

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Originally, the player was in control of Joel instead of Ellie during the sequence, which resulted in a "horrible" feeling for the player.

"You were just walking alongside her, and she's asking questions about what happened, and you were being quite quiet, giving one-word answers," he told Digital Spy and other attendees at the conference.

"I felt so guilty - I thought, this feels horrible! The thing is, because you were playing as Joel, you're close to Joel, and you empathise with Joel. You try to internally justify all the things that happened in that sequence [at the hospital]."

Designer Ricky Cambier - who had worked on the game's Ellie-controlled Winter section - suggested swapping control of the characters. This switch, which Field said was "really easy" to make, changed the feel of the scene dramatically.



"All of a sudden the whole tone in the sequence changed," he explained. "I was viewing the actions that Joel had just committed in the hospital through Ellie's eyes as opposed to Joel's.

"Switching the character changed my perspective on the action. Instead of internally justifying, because I was Joel, I was a little bit more separately from the action.

"I know it brings in narrative questions that Ellie can't know possibly what happened in the hospital, but from the player's point of view, when you switch the perspective, it makes you view the actions in a completely different way. I thought that was interesting."

Field also discussed other tweaks and changes to key story moments, which were handled with inventive repurposing of existing mechanics.



One was during the game's Spring section, where Ellie had become depressed after the events of the Winter section, which the team wanted to show through gameplay as well as cutscenes and dialogue.

An example of this was moments before the giraffe section. Joel would call Ellie to give her a leg-up boost to a higher ledge, but instead she ignores you, and is found sitting on a nearby bench.

"The boost is a mechanic that you've done 100 times before in the game, it's very familiar to you," Field explained.

"Joel goes to boost Ellie, and she's not even there. [After calling her a second time] we make the player turn around and perform the full boost again. That's usually bad game design - you don't make the player go through more steps than necessary. But here, using that extra step does fit in with Ellie being indifferent."

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The team tried different levels of 'frustration' during this scene to demonstrate how despondent Ellie had become. At one stage they had her not present at all after Joel calls for her - resulting in the player having to locate where she was - but this was dropped when it was suggested that some players could consider her disappearance a bug.

Field also discussed Joel's near-fatal injury in the closing events of the university section. Following the narrative disconnect that occurred in Uncharted 2 - where Nathan Drake becomes critically injured from a bullet wound as part of the story, despite the player taking part in countless gunfights up until that point - Naughty Dog was keen to have something "wildly different" occur to what happens in regular combat.

The Last of Us review (PS3): A beautiful world with a compelling story

The end result was Joel falling onto a steel rebar. The team tried different ways of leading up to that sequence - such as Joel giving a leg-up boost to Ellie, only for an enemy to charge through the door mid-animation and knock him over - but ultimately settled on a scuffle and a fall from a balcony.

Field worked on Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us during his time at Naughty Dog, and is now game designer at Media Molecule's unannounced PS4 project.

The Last of Us Remastered, released on PS4 on August 1 in Europe and July 29 in North America, recreates the adventure with improved visuals, developer commentary and all previous downloadable content..

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