GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE

(click the blog entry title to link to this random italian website that hopefully still has the video)



OMG.
The quality is crap, there's hardly any sound, there's ads popping up, and some parts are completely impossible to see.
I AM STILL SO IMPRESSED.

So this is basically the same footage that all of the reporters have seen, and it was shown at the Game Developer's Conference this week. And totally ganked via cellphone I guess. Regardless, I'm going to write about it in case the video gets pulled (some of the copies have already gotten yanked. But I've seen it already and there's nothing they can do about that HA).

The movement looks super smooth, although I'm not entirely sure which parts are cut-scene-ish and what parts are fully player-controlled...but either way it flows really well. Drake does these cool baseball slides to get to cover if he's running towards them which makes SO MUCH more sense than randomly rolling all the time. After he gets like blown up at some point he limps for a few seconds. When he is hanging on lampposts they pull out of the wall with his weight, and he swings back and forth with momentum, he lands kind of awkwardly, and really can climb on like everything ("when in doubt...")

The hand-to-hand combat looks like they've simplified it, it might just be hitting square once and then triangle? But I've already stated my position on that whole thing (namely that it's not that hard, so suck it up you babies.)

Now there's clearly a lot more brown than there was in the last game, but I'm willing to forgive that for two reasons. One: there are pops of color in nice little places-- the flags across the street, for instance, and the bus and the street signs. It's kind of sad that the sky is brown, because I loved the gorgeous cloud and sunlight graphics from the first game, but I suppose here it makes sense that the sky is icky, given the tone of the situation. The other reason is that we know that there is a wide variety
of settings to look forward to-- snowy mountains, temples, a swamp I think-- so we won't be in Brownsylvania the whole time. This is acceptable, I suppose, although a legitimate concern I think, given many recent games' tendencies for "realism."
But we know that Naughty Dog has a sense of humor about that (remember the "Next-Gen filter" option?) so I think we're okay

And of course Nathan is as human as ever. He stumbles, his footing slips, he makes snarky comments about getting blown up by a bus. I think we're good here.

So that's pretty much it for now. It's a short clip, but there's a lot there, and it's looking promising.
I'm pumped. :-D