14 DAY TRIAL // The Last of Us, the new project under development at Naughty Dog, is set to challenge a number of the assumptions about the third-person action game genre and the character of the main characters will be one of the first to be tested.
The game will allow gamers to control Joel, an older man, and Ellie, a young girl, as they trek across the United States in order to get a better shot at surviving the apocalypse.
Troy Baker, who is the voice of main character Joel, has told the Official PlayStation Magazine in the United Kingdom that the protagonist of The Last of Us has a different profile from other action heroes, stating, “He’s not a hero, he’s not a badass. He’s a guy that learned how to use a gun because he had to, and he’s fighting every day because that’s what you do.
“Does that mean that steals this, that does this? Maybe. But it’s not that he has a plan, or that he’s a strong archetypal character.”
He added, “I really think it’s gonna turn the model of the hero on its ass.”
Troy Baker is quite the video game leading man at the moment as he is also playing the part of the detective Booker in BioShock Infinite, also working alongside a girl, this time called Elizabeth, in order to escape a flying island called Columbia.
He also played the part of Snow in the last two single-player oriented Final Fantasy XIII Japanese role-playing game titles.
The new Naughty Dog game draws inspiration from The Road but also from a BBC documentary that suggested a fungus plaguing ants could make the jump to human hosts.
The Last of Us should be released in the last few months of 2012 or early during next year exclusively on the PlayStation 3 from Sony.