If there’s one thing to be said about Naughty Dog and their marketing of The Last of Us 2, the story looks to be as emotional as ever, and everything looks disturbingly real which applies to the game’s violence as well. According to Naughty Dog however, disturbing and realistic violence is exactly what the studio is going for. This may not earn the studio many fans, particularly those who are already perturbed by the violence shown in the game, but at least the studio are honest about their intentions.
Not that it’s hard to understand what those intentions are when we’ve been shown two major things, one a demo and the other a trailer, that showed off lots of bloody, gory violence that would make even the strongest of us flinch even a little. There were people being smacked with a hammer, a woman was hung from a tree while being cut in the stomach and a lot of other violent acts that left some wondering whether Naughty Dog was trying to glorify the game’s violence.
Yet thanks to a recent interview with Buzzfeed, via VGR, Naughty Dog Vice President and The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann, along with co-writer Halley Gross, talked about why the overly realistic depiction of violence and murder was included in the first place.
They stated, “our aesthetic approach to violence is to make it as grounded and real as possible, and we watch — sometimes uncomfortably — a lot of videos from the world, right? The world that we know, and try to say ‘okay, we don’t want to make it sexy. How do we make it real? How do we make it uncomfortable because art at times should be uncomfortable?'”
What’s more, they also state that they aren’t here to make the violence “fun” but “engaging” to play, which the two claim is essential to the depiction of the excessive violence in the game. Whether you agree or not is up to you.
