Former Naughty Dog programmer talks about how a slightly different ending was considered for TLOU 2, his experience working on the studio, and other fun things (from an old interview in Spanish, translated)
PT 2 DISCUSSIONI just stumbled across this interview from 2020 with former Rockstar Games and Naughty Dog programmer Fran Aisa, and I thought he said some really interesting things that may have gone unnoticed by the English community as the video has a small number of views.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not really involved in the TLOU community and haven't played the games, but I know how they generally go, and I found this stuff super interesting, so I'll translate some points he made but if someone is interested in a more in-depth translation, ask and I'll try doing it! Also, I'm not a native speaker, so please forgive any mistakes or awkward phrasing!
Original interview in Spanish, credits to The Last of Us ES:
About his time working with Naughty Dog and Rockstar Games:
- He talked about how company culture worked between R* games and Naughty Dog, saying that Naughty Dog gave the team much more creative freedom with their work, he himself having a direct channel to Neil Druckmann and being able to pitch ideas. He also remarks how ND only has 1 office in Santa Monica, California, while R* has several, spanning different countries. He worked on a team of 30 programmers making the whole game, while in R* he worked with 30 programmers focusing only on "gameplay systems".
- When he first joined, he started working on a Demo they had planned. He then was inherited some systems including:
- Climbing walls and ladders (originally from "Ryan", probably former programmer, idk who he is).
- Jumping from and to ledges (originally from the same person that made the sliding system).
- Finishing said sliding system, as it was only half done when he joined.
- Weapons systems, specifically how you throw bottles and bricks, animations for grabbing stuff from the backpack, smoke grenades, Molotov's (he fixed them), mines (made from scratch) and a bow modification showing you where the arrow will land.
- He talked about a couple things he pitched/weren't high up the list of priorities but ended up adding because he thought they were cool:
- When you jump, they wanted to do contextual animations, so when you jump but barely miss and hit a wall head up, you bounce back instead of using a normal falling animation.
- If you are on a slippery sliding surface and instead of just falling naturally, you jump, the character smashes their head and back. Originally it showed no facial animation, but he thought part of the immersion of TLOU 1 was facial expressions, so he worked with the cinematics department to implement a system that would change them to fear/panic and pain when they hit the ground. You can use photo mode to better see this in action.
Some fun easter eggs and anecdotes:
- There's a calendar with a cat somewhere in game, that cat belongs to a friend of his on the studio.
- Some enemies in the game use facial scans from people around the studio, some are friends of his.
- They were sent emails encouraging them to make up superheroes for some cards in game, after that they'd be sent to the art department for finishing. There's a card featuring an evil doctor based on Neil.
- Ellie's guitar is modeled after a director's own guitar. Fran submitted his own for a chance to be in the game, but they didn't choose it.
- He proposed voicing a Spanish speaking character, but it didn't go anywhere.
- There was a bug for some weeks where character animations didn't translate well to different skeletal meshes, so it resulted in characters having really long necks during their animations.
- Some play testers refused to kill dogs and just stopped playing, and others killed themselves on purpose while playing as Abby against Ellie.
Regarding the story:
- He was given a brief spanning the whole story the moment he joined. He liked how they had a brave approach going into it, and the decision to kill Joel and make Ellie the main character.
- The part they had the most trouble with was regarding how to make players empathize with Abby. He said that the hardest part for him was to empathize with her, even after spending a lot of time working with her. He still thinks they managed to make their point in the final product.
- (Here he's asked as a fan: What would've you changed from the game?) He thinks the game's tempo can get really slow, especially the beginning with Ellie and the aquarium level with Abby. Also, he would've liked a more open world approach, similar to the Seattle level.
- In the final fight against Abby, it was originally intended for the player to be given a prompt to drown her by spamming a button, but without being able to fully do it, making the player realize they have to willingly spare her life. Some play testers just kept pressing the button to try and finish Abby though, which didn't work very well. Fran thought it'd be cool to be given a real choice, but he knew the team wouldn't accept it as the story was already meant to end this way to convey the message more clearly.
That's pretty much it regarding TLOU. He talked some specifics about console and PC ports, and some technical stuff from RDR2, but I don't think it's really relevant here, so I'll just leave it out.
Whew, I didn't think I'd take this long, but anyways hope you guys enjoyed it and find it interesting!
Edit: formatting, grammar
