"What interests us most about The Last of Us are the technical elements that aren't immediately apparent from the limited amount of canned footage we have, specifically in how Naughty Dog has set out to achieve its "wide linear" gameplay - the notion of tackling the game via multiple routes and adopting different game styles to suit.

This sounds terrible in comparision to say, STALKER C.O.P. where everything is 100% real time. I spawned six of the toughest class of pseudogiants inan army base full of many army mans with tough guns. That was hard. This is just the idea we've seen countless times in other games. It's not as though the weather will change, radically altering the experience, or anything of that sort.

At its most basic level, a lot of this comes down to level design. In the walkthrough video, we see protagonist Joel taking one route through the building, but it's clear to see that there are multiple entry points, suggesting different strategies for handling the Hunters.

Alan Wake, Witcher 2, Max Payne 3, Binaryt Domain, Jet Set Radio Future and Killer 7 are video games that puts me constantly awe of their surroundings. Why, then, does The Last of Us get its praise? It forces you to memorize environments. You HAVE to pay attention to things, rather than just run right through them.

However, what is the most intriguing element about the game is the dynamic AI, where characters move, talk and act in a highly contextual manner."

No. I can garuntee you it's not as impressive as a lot of people seem to claim from any amount of preview videos they've shown.

In STALKER, characters are alive. They have lives. They move from place to place, with things like weather, time of day (certain mutants are more active at night or in dark places; controllers never leave their caves, etc), number of anomalies present (imagine, if you will, a ball of flame that just flies around at random and sets you on fire, or a shimmering spot of air that is nearly invisible but will rip you to shreds if you step in it), and so on and so forth.

They make decisions. They have tactics and plans. STALKER has no pattern recognition element at all. You can get a general idea for how an enemy will behave, but that's about it. This makes the game a significantly harder experience, particularly if, like me, you decided to spawn a bunch of extra monsters just to see what would happen.

LOU = Everything you've seen before, but with 10x the "Cinematic" approach forgetting the point of a video game to begin with. Then again, that's most of Sony's exclusives anyway lol.

[QUOTE="princeofshapeir"] The Uncharted games suffer from the same graphical inconsistencies as in those pics. This is what console games look like. Get over it.[/QUOTE]
LOL like that over the top grainy sky? The Last of Us will be in the top 3 of best graphical games in 2013, Beyond: Two Souls will be nr.1