It has been more than a year since The Last of Us Part 2 was released in the final stretch of PS4, but even today it is still one of the most spectacular and breathtaking games on the scene. The second part of the story of Ellie, Joel and company many times pushes the player to the emotional limit with really raw and shocking sequences, so Naughty Dog decided to space the tension with quieter and more contemplative narrative scenes or with the famous guitar minigame. Through a new entry in the PlayStation blog, the team has explained the idea behind this mechanic that ended up becoming a hallmark of the game.
Starting from the idea that music has always been an important part of The Last of US, for the second part, the Naughty Dog team wanted to put that component in the hands of the players. “The idea came first from a narrative angle: between our first internal tone of the story and our first external trailer, the guitar was always the focus of the story. And as designers, we wanted to make the guitar playable from the beginning, so that the musician would feel that connection between Joel and Ellie. “
It had to serve a greater purpose than simply playing the guitar, «remember a loved one and express yourself through music to connect with them«. To implement it, they were inspired by existing games and music creation applications and even mobile games, from which they got the idea of use the touchpad on the PS4 controller to strum the strings.
Getting started in this function was relatively easy because Actress Ashley Johnosn (Ellie) had previously been captured When playing “Take on Me” on the guitar, it was more challenging to decide how long the player was going to be playing or how success in the minigame was to be determined. “We saw that a good way to distinguish success from failure was tracking the progression of the chords, but leaving the plucking of the strings to the player. This allows the player to determine more musical expression, including things like tempo, time signature, and style, while still making the song recognizable. “
In the end, it was a disciplinary work where multiple teams participated. They featured “mocap data from our amazing actors, our incredible animation team adjusting finger positions and strumming gestures; our stellar music and sound teams recording different guitars and getting hundreds of individual notes ”or the department that made the minigame’s user interface, among many others.
The team was hopeful that this content would eventually work in two different ways: ‘First, the narrative rhythms would have an emotional weight and players would think ‘huh?’ with our characters and with their connections through these songs. Second, our extra special hope was that the practice mode would lead to original content; that players would start to cover songs beyond those included in the game. Which finally ended up happening.
Now that you know how the guitar minigame for The Last of US Part was devised, tell us, were you one of those players who created your own music through free mode?
▪ Release date: 06/19/2020