New PS3 exclusive will be announced on the 10th - lastofus.com

DBT85 · 6 Dec 2011 at 22:40

Apologies if this has been brought up already (I did look!) but I thought I'd better share if it hadn't.

On December the 10th at the VGA awards in the US an "unbelievable PS3 exclusive" will be revealed.

All we have so far are the website and two videos.

http://lastofus.com/

http://youtu.be/csubsCk86sw?hd=1

http://youtu.be/Akls5zpXcm4?hd=1

Lots of speculation that it's going to be post apocalypse and zombies but nobody has a real idea yet.

Update 7th Dec:

A new teaser image has appeared. Bearing in mind i'm currently reading The Passage it all seems quite familiar!

Large image is in the spoiler.

The text on the paper says

The President addresses a panicked nation as millions more are feared dead or infected.

Our union remains strong, the military is making large gains and securing additional quarantine zones. This is our turning point. We are not and will not become the last of us. Mankind will prevail.

England latest to declare martial law

Texas, New Mexico quarantine fails

DBT85 · 6 Dec 2011 at 23:57

Shamikebab said:
Post apocalypse and zombies?

Well I'm glad that they'll be combining two things that are so underused in games at the moment

That's the worry! Horse and bolted will come leaping to mind if it does transpire to be another zombie game.

DBT85 · 7 Dec 2011 at 00:59

a teaser from Geoff Keighley just popped up on GameTrailers.com

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/vga-2011-spike-vgas/724642

DBT85 · 7 Dec 2011 at 06:40

ps3ud0 said:
Doubt its HL3, more a spinoff like the original HL had with OF and BS. Just cant see HL3 ever being a platform exclusive, Valve just dont need that...

Valve and Sony are getting on quite well right now and Microsoft kind of restrict them on what they can do because they won't let steam onto the 360. HL3 as a console PS3 exclusive could well happen though obviously it would also be on the PC as well.

And maybe everyone should look at the Keighley tease at 0:54 seconds. It's a scene for Master Chief from the Halo 4 tease at E3 but Halo 4 has already been announced as a Microsoft published game. What it could well be is a Bungie exclusive which could be the shooter that Sony have always wanted.

Since Bungie are being published by Activision you have to assume that this is just a timed exclusive rather than a full one. Though a year timed exclusive on Bungies next IP could be massive for Sony.

It's all just speculation though. Though apparently there could be another tease on the thelastofus.com site as there is a date there for today.

For it to be an exclusive that no one would believe it has to be something that isn't an established PS3 franchise.

It may not be a Sony developed game, it could be a3rd party that Sony is publishing, it could be that they are just saying "from Sony" because that's who the announcement is from".

either way there are going to be meltdowns when it is announced. Either very happy or "that wasn't unexpected" lol.

DBT85 · 7 Dec 2011 at 21:58

mmj_uk said:
My guess is something from the Uncharted developers (Naughty Dog?), explains the exclusivity and hype about the graphics.

But an exclusive game from a 1st party developer is about as shocking as finding sand in your crack after you've been to the beach.

While I can see a 1st party having a helping hand because they know the tech so well and we have heard nothing from them (Santa Monica, Cambridge, etc) I think if it was to match the hype that Keighley is orgasming over would need to be from a 3rd party in at least some form. If that is the case then I can't see it being a PS3 exclusive forever simply because there is money to be made from the xbox audience. I'm fully expecting whatever it is, if it really is this megaton announcement will turn up on the 360 12 months after the PS3.

Sony have already said that they don't pay for exclusive games, but they do pay for exclusive content or timing. So BF3 for example all DLC is out 1 week early. They would have given something up for that.

A lot of speculation is now that it could be Epic since they have completed the 3 game contract they had with Microsoft and have already talked about wanting to be on the PS3. They own the Gears name but they have said their game is a new IP. Who knows. Dec 10th (11th for us) will be interesting regardless.

DBT85 · 8 Dec 2011 at 00:18

A new teaser image has appeared. Bearing in mind i'm currently reading The Passage it all seems quite familiar!

Large image is in the spoiler.

The text on the paper says

The President addresses a panicked nation as millions more are feared dead or infected.

Our union remains strong, the military is making large gains and securing additional quarantine zones. This is our turning point. We are not and will not become the last of us. Mankind will prevail.

England latest to declare martial law

Texas, New Mexico quarantine fails

As long as it isn't zombies I think they'll be ok. As I said, it sounds very much like The Passage which I'll describe below.

Which sees the military experimenting on people sent to death row. They are testing something which will give long life and so on but something happens, they get out, 1 in 10 people become the same thing and the rest are quite literally ripped apart.

California remains mostly un infected and declares independance. In the interim the Govt has rounded up all children under 16 and sent them to secure compounds surrounded by 20m high walls with high powered lights to come on at night (the virals don't like the light). The story picks up 1000 years later at the 3rd conference on North American quarantine as you read through the life of people come 100 years after the outbreak. So bad it was that the entire planet now refers to time in relation to when the outbreak started.

The children sent to the compund's have grown up and had their own children and none of them have ever seen the stars because the lights have been on every night since they were taken there. Lots of stuff ensues.

Excellent book!

DBT85 · 8 Dec 2011 at 01:04

Tom84 said:
Gears of War prequel I'm telling ya

Microsoft would just give epic ridiculous money just to change the name to something else anyway. While Epic do own the name it is synonymous with the 360 and Microsoft would do just about anything to keep it that way.

DBT85 · 9 Dec 2011 at 02:01

possible reference to the game inside Uncharted 3?

http://youtu.be/jfF9y_Z6Zvg?hd=1

I can't believe that this will be a ND game with in game footage ready to show already since they only just churned out U3.

I wonder if ND or Santa Monica have been working with Epic to make something? Those two know the PS3 batter than anyone and will be able to get more out of it with Epic than anyone else would.

DBT85 · 10 Dec 2011 at 08:56

So more importantly how long do we think it'll be until it launches?

On the basis that we are apparently seeing in game footage instead of trailer footage i'm going to say it'll be out in June. No idea if they'll even announce a date tonight!

DBT85 · 11 Dec 2011 at 01:53

And the resulting outcome for those that have not seen it

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/vga-2011-the-last-of/724686

@cbalestra - Co President of Naughty Dog

"The Last of Us trailer was rendered in engine on PS3"

Images in the spoiler since they are a bit big.

Looks like an actual survival post apoc game rather than run and gun the zombies like so many others. And Wow does it look pretty.

Also very surprised that this is in engine footage so soon after U3 was out. Must have been working in it for some time now.

DBT85 · 11 Dec 2011 at 02:03

Tom84 said:
You got that from the CGI?

All games are CGI...

also just up

The Last of Us is a genre-defining experience that blends survival and action elements to tell a character driven story about a population decimated by a modern plague. Abandoned cities are being reclaimed by nature and the remaining survivors are killing each other for food, weapons and whatever they can get their hands on. Joel, a ruthless survivor, and Ellie, a brave teenage girl who is wise beyond her years, must work together to survive their journey across what remains of the United States.

clearly its a sports game.

DBT85 · 11 Dec 2011 at 03:01

jesta said:
The girl in this game reminds me of Ellen Page.

There is a good reason for that

DBT85 · 11 Dec 2011 at 11:49

wozza2k said:
Is the girl based on Ellen Page?

If you mean voiced by and modelled after then yes she is lol. She tweeted last night that she was glad she didn't have to keep it a secret any more.

Also good to see it's the U2 director on it. It is really quite something that they managed to keep an entire second team hidden for two years. No job postings leaks, no image leaks and no hints dropped.

Speculation now is what the team that did U3 are now working on. Have they joined the TLOU team or have they been given license to start on a new game/ip or just U4 for the PS4.

Considering that people are expecting the PS4 to drop sometime in 2013 or 14 they would need to be starting around now for launch.

DBT85 · 11 Dec 2011 at 20:31

TheVoice said:
It's not Ellen Page, it's Ashley Johnson.

Interesting. I've been lied to!

DBT85 · 11 Dec 2011 at 23:35

Noel Gallagher said:
It's okay, not visually stunning as I comments said on various other sites. Still, it looks like something I may be interested in

Not visually stunning? Can you just define your parameters for me?

DBT85 · 12 Dec 2011 at 00:36

Psycho Sonny said:
then why haven't sony designed the ps3 to be easy for developers to code?

could you not just code it in whatever language you want, convert it into binary then covert it again into whatever the ps3 uses?

that would be a much easier system to work with.

Because they were arrogant on the back of the PS2 success (which was also difficult to programme for) and they thought that people would still use it regardless. Had the PS3 been as popular as the PS2 then you'll have seen more titles made for the PS3 and ported to the 360 rather than the other way around which you have today.

On one hand the PS4 could use the Cell again (much expanded) which would mean everything devs have learned will be useful to them again and BC would be fairly straight forward. On the other they could change it up again for something that is just generally easy to develop for.

I'm sticking to my guess that they'll stick with the former since the SDKs and all the tools are apparently orders of magnitude better now than they were when the PS3 launched. As a result sticking with familiar tech will probably benefit them.

DBT85 · 12 Dec 2011 at 22:31

Tummy said:
Hola!

While, I think the game looks pretty good, just feels stale, I mean another Zombie game

*sigh*

Just out of interest what other things would you like to kill and how many of the apparently millions of recent zombie games did you actually play? I mean, the only options for things to kill in games are pretty much humans, robots, aliens or monsters. And any monster which looks like a human and might eat humans is automatically called a zombie regardless of it not being undead, not moving slowly, not having flesh falling off of its bones etc. Zombie these days just means has 2 arms and legs and eats people apparently.

And to be fair, the trailer shows 2 dead humans and only 1 dead "zombie". So if anything should it not be "just another game where we kill stuff"?

DBT85 · 12 Dec 2011 at 23:53

Shamikebab said:
Zombies are lazy though, the A.I. is just "run at you until you or me are dead"

Aliens and humans have so much more potential for interesting combat, whether through human squad tactics or the sheer potential of the human mind for creating weird and wonderful aliens to fight.

Zombies are cheap and easy to churn out and that's why we see so many of them now.

But we know almost nothing of what these creatures act like. They appear in the trailer in a pod of 3, 2 run off somewhere else (I guess to the other dead body) and the one that comes for the characters doesn't do so until you hear the guy **** the revolver too loud. We have no idea if they will fight tactically or if they just all hurl towards you like "zombies".

The "zombies" were in the 2:30 trailer for all of about 8 seconds yet there people are dismissing the entire game as "meh zombies". It's just baffling to me.

DBT85 · 13 Dec 2011 at 19:53

An excellent article by Eurogamer http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-13-the-last-of-us-preview. Also talks about how it came close to being leaked on a couple of occssions and some other bits.

Contrary to evidence in the trailer, however, The Last of Us is "not a zombie game," insists Straley. Druckmann explains: "If the game was about the monsters, we would have not showed them. The story's not about them, so [we thought] let's get it out of the way."

"We approached this genre because we felt no-one is getting to the heart of it. [The Last of Us] tells you something about the human condition - that's what you want to do as a storyteller."
With that in mind, imagine the shockwaves that reverberated around the Naughty Dog office when they saw that Dead Island trailer.
"We saw it and we thought, wait a minute, someone else is doing this - it's really moving, there's this family that's been torn apart," says Druckmann. But, as we now know, it bore little relation to the finished article.
"You saw the game and it wasn't that," he adds. "I'm not saying whether it was a good or bad game, but it wasn't that. And we feel our trailer is very representative of what we're going for." Not least because the footage is all in-engine.

"Over the years we've staffed up an incredible team - these people at any other studio could be leads," says studio boss Evan Wells. "When you have a franchise like Uncharted you become a target for headhunters and recruiters - basically everybody in the company's been asked if they'd like to come some place else.

"We were afraid that if we didn't give these people the opportunity and the responsibility to try something different in their career, one day one of those calls might stick. So really we just wanted to embrace the talent we have here and give it a shot."

When the fruits of this labour of love will be shared with gamers, no-one is saying. And, in the wake of the brutal crunch endured by the Uncharted 3 team in order to meet a release date it recklessly announced a year in advance, that should come as no surprise.
"We will never do that again, not a year out," sighs co-president Christophe Balestra. Wells agrees: "The minute we saw [the date] on screen we were like, oh god, I really regret that."
So, while the game has already been in development for two years, with the team not yet ready even to discuss gameplay let alone show it, don't be surprised if The Last of Us fails to materialise before 2013. It'll be done when it's done, as the saying goes.

DBT85 · 14 Dec 2011 at 20:42

anticonscience said:
I'm not saying it will be out soon. I just hate these announcements (like C&C Generals 2) when they are so far off.

I originally posted in this thread that it would be Fall 2012 when it comes out, but after reading that I wouldn't be surprised if it was Fall 2013.

3/4 years to build a game (they have already had two) which means the possiblity of another two year development cycle which would fit with what I said about being showed at loads of trade shows (E3 2012/ TGS 2012 + whatever else, then E3 2013/TGS 2013).

Obviously only time will tell when it does actually come out, and how it will actually play, but for now my interest is peaked by the game, and I will just see what pans out.

To be fair all three Uncharted games were released within 12 months of the initial tease like the one we saw for TLOU. I'd have to guess that they'll be aiming for something similar but they didn't set a date so that if it goes on another 6 months then it goes on another 6 months.

Unless something really bizarre happens though this is in no way comparable to things like GT5, FF13 or FF13vs which were announced 5+ years before they were released and in the case of FF13vs it could be nearer 7 or 8!!

Personally I prefer the Apple method of "This is the iStick, you can buy it in stores from Monday" as you don't have to wait for it and people get caught up in the hype rather than some people forgetting about it for another 10 months until they get a release date.