The Last of Us- GOTG?

[Stark]

@jayred How full is your PS3 HDD? I'm having an issue where the first time I start the game the initial load is really really long. And today on my commute I thought that maybe it was because my HDD is nearly full. I'm gonna clear some stuff off and try tonight, will let you know.

[jay_red]

So I was able to put a considerable amount of time into this yesterday, once the amazingly long initial load screen is out of the way, it plays smooth enough.

The game is great, and each section is tense, and you really are worried about your inventory, and how to handle the situation. The AI still is not the brightest, but the game makes up for it by sending a lot of guys, it still makes for very tense encounters.

I'm trying to not spoil anything, but there is one thing that kind of bothered me:

The passage of time. When we first get Ellie, and start the journey, it only takes a day or 2 to get to the capital building, but after that the game starts jumping. First it was just down the road to the first town, then it was the whole season (summer to fall, and across the country!)Then you ride a horse across 2 states. These are major gaps that, I guess we assume that nothing happened to them.

Overall so far I am loving the game, I'm not sure if its the game of this generation in my eyes, but its damn good, and I cant wait to play it to the end.

Stark: my HDD is almost empty, as I just installed a 500 gb from my stock 40, and have not put anything new on it yet. The load times never get any better BTW, everytime I turned on the game, I got out my 3ds to play animal crossing for the 10 minutes it takes to get back into it. My dog walked up to the ps3 while I was playing last night, and hit the eject button with his nose and caused the game to quit, I was so mad!

[SpoonyBard]

Should be said that the initial Loading % screen only came up for me the first time I played it. So i'd have to assume it's installing. The load screen before the game starts still takes about 2 minutes.

I ran into two situations where I lost the background layer throughout the game. Once at a ladder, where it put me at a weird camera angle. And once in a death scene towards the end of the game.

I also had one cut scene near the middle of the game lose audio for a moment.

Those are the only errors i've experienced so far with the standard edition on a 120gb slim with at least half of my drive space free.

[jay_red]

Should be said that the initial Loading % screen only came up for me the first time I played it. So i'd have to assume it's installing. The load screen before the game starts still takes about 2 minutes.

I ran into two situations where I lost the background layer throughout the game. Once at a ladder, where it put me at a weird camera angle. And once in a death scene towards the end of the game.

I also had one cut scene near the middle of the game lose audio for a moment.

Those are the only errors i've experienced so far with the standard edition on a 120gb slim with at least half of my drive space free.

I had the camera angle mess up on me too, it got stuck at my feet, and I could not see where I was going. I just kept pressing on to make it to a cutscene or something that would hopefully reset the camera.

[Phades]

For what it's worth, I haven't had any major technical glitches playing on a 160GB PS3 slim. I had about a 5 minute initial install and since then the game loads in a reasonable amount of time. I'm back to playing in about 1-2 minutes from the time I boot the game up. Reloads at death are near instant.

I'm wondering if changing out the drive has any impact? I noticed on my older PS3 that even though it had a technically faster, 7200 RPM drive, I had far worse performance on game loads than I've had from my stock 160GB drive.

[Niode]

I'm wondering if changing out the drive has any impact? I noticed on my older PS3 that even though it had a technically faster, 7200 RPM drive, I had far worse performance on game loads than I've had from my stock 160GB drive.

Seek rate is the most limiting factor on PS3. It's heavily bottle necked on bandwidth so a faster drive will have no improvement what so ever. A faster drive RPM with worse seek rate will actually have a detrimental effect on performance with PS3s. It's one of the reasons, outside a couple of edge cases such as Gran Turismo 5, that SSDs don't improve loading on PS3. It's just not set up in the same way as a PC is, it simply doesn't utilise the HDD in a similar manner. The best thing you can do with the HDD upgrade in the PS3 is to look for the lowest latency drive you can get your hands on regardless of RPM. I went for a 5400rpm drive with low latency and have experience no issues.

I'm running a 500GB drive installed in a 12GB Super Slim and I had no issues with loading TLOU. Outside of the initial 10 minute install I never saw a loading screen apart from when I started the game back up after a break (IE turning off the PS3 completely).

Jay_red I think you've got something screwy going on with your PS3, either that or you're exaggerating the issues you're experiencing. What happens if you put the original drive in (the one that came with the PS3) and load the game. It's most likely a HDD issue. Especially since it's done the same thing with two different discs. Either that or your bluray drive is on the blink and for some reason TLOU doesn't do any data verification. It could be writing corrupt information without realising it. Considering Naughty Dog's track record for flaunting platform libraries (the original Crash is a masterpiece in exploiting hardware to it's maximum, pre-occlusion WITHOUT a Z-buffer - PSX had no z-buffer and by product no texture processing it's the reason why textures looked like ass on PSX, vertex animation -didn't become standard until PS2!!, it's even one of the few games to utilise the PSXs 'hi-res' 512x240 mode) it's not too hard to imagine these guys getting rid of any data checking in order to achieve faster writes to disk, especially with such a dynamic loading heavy title as this. It's crazy just how smooth this game transitions. It's completely seamless. Even with deaths you're rarely out of the game for longer than 5 seconds.

What ND have achieved here is nothing short of magic. I'm sure with time we'll be able to pick apart what they did here and laugh at it like we laugh at how incredible MGS2 looked back in the day. They are the masters of wrangling unwieldy pieces of hardware and making them compose symphonies. The talent of these guys technicality-wise is awe-inspiring. Top that amazing cake off with some decent script writers and you've got a recipe for every single critic lapping it up. It's a marvel. It really is. Is it a good game though?

[mild spoilers below!!]

After just wrapping the game on hard (seriously, why do they lock me out of playing on the highest difficulty without completing the game first, I hate that), I found it mostly predictable and those puzzle sections are just a joke. Were all the puzzle designers busy working on the excellent Moire Cog puzzle in Uncharted 3 to bother working on any puzzles in this game? If you're just going to insult us with "this ledge is too high, there must be some way to get up here" and then practically putting a neon sign above the wheely bin saying "PUSH THIS - LEDGE SO JOEL CAN CLIMB CLIMB DERRRRRRRRRRRRRR" (not just the first time either, every single puzzle is like this, and there are many!) then I'd rather you just not bother. A ladder puzzle does not a good design make.

The combat is weighty and meaningful and just about makes up for the completely uninspired 'puzzles', I love games where firing a gun feels like firing a gun. These things are fucking powerful and the little bb-gun pops that a lot of games employ these days is just pitiful and not a reflection on how a real gun handles. I liked that Joel wasn't a complete juggernaut killing machine, it added a much needed gravitas to the situation. It's a shame that the game didn't champion the no-kills route though. I'm not even sure it's possible to get through the game with no kills. In fact, it could actually break the game story-wise as there are several moments in the mid to late game that reference the amount of guys Joel put down as the main impetus in the story direction at that point. There are definitely areas where it appears you must kill to progress such as the roof top section with Henry and Sam or the searchlight section shortly afterwards. It would be nice if the game altered following a human-pacifist (if it's even possible) play through. I doubt it though.

I guess my main gripe is the complete lack of consequence. Joel has the potential to be a complete fucking monster killing everything in his path. I guess the game leaves that up to you, but as mentioned before, this is a critical plot detail. I understand that this game is trying to come over morally ambiguous - What would YOU do to survive. It just comes over a bit flat. There's no real sort of rush to the story progression. It's all a bit "well if we get there it's all roses, but there's no rush". The game REALLY plods around for a fair chunk. Nothing of any particular consequence happens. "kill loads these guys because we want to make Joel out to be Jeckyl & Hyde character later", "now show his sensitive and compassionate side" "Now make him kills loads of people again". It's just predictable and shows we still have a large way to go as far as storytelling in games goes. Even Heavy Rain succumbed to such pratfalls. It's a good story as far as games go, but it's not exactly Pulitzer material is it?

Just for the record. I don't hate the game, I actually really enjoyed it. It's just, that the game is getting lauded for its premise and storytelling, as well as looking pretty-as-fuck. It's not that hard when the vast majority of your competition are still drawing with finger paints and you're Roberto Bernardi. I think it says more about the video game industry as a whole that a pulp fiction tale with fairly two dimensional characters is considered the greatest storytelling of a generation.

[SamuraiMegas]

Naughty Dog just learned they could use big boy words in this game it appears.

[jay_red]

Jay_red I think you've got something screwy going on with your PS3, either that or you're exaggerating the issues you're experiencing.

Let me tell you, I wish I was exaggerating what I have been experiencing! I actually almost made a video, uncut, to demonstrate how long it takes from boot up to playing. And from what I gather, this game does not install, go look at your game data section on the XMB, I have 2 files, one is 46mb, one is 40kb. If I go down to my heavy rain data, it is 4gb.

From what I gathered reading on the forums in the link I posted, is that a lot of people seem to have issues with the Fat PS3's mainly, but that isnt to say its only them, there were quite a few people with slims and super slims reporting issues.

Edit:
Played some more tonight, turned on the ps3 at 7:27, was able to start playing at 7:38, just to give an example.

[ZenErik]

The Last of Us. Game of the Year OR Movie of the Year? I like more game in my games.

[dsheinem]

The Last of Us. Game of the Year OR Movie of the Year? I like more game in my games.

I'm about seven hours in (almost half way through). The vast majority of the time I've spent with the game involves scavenging for things, walking around the gameworld, and engaging in stealth or combat. Are there plenty of cutscenes? Sure. Is it even 25% of the game time so far? No.