The latest issue of Game Informer features some juicy new details about Naughty Dog's latest project, The Last of Us, including details about the game's plot and confirmation that it'll ship with an online multiplayer mode.
Though the trailer for The Last of Us seemed to channel equal parts I Am Legend and The Road, the game's post-apocalyptic world isn't quite as dire as all that. Apparently, some small portion of the US military managed to survive the outbreak and establish quarantine zones where civilization has continued to endure. As you'd expect, military rule plus zombies equals authoritarianism, complete with checkpoints and no-trial executions for anyone who might be infected.
Outside the walls of quarantine zones, things are a bit more in line with what you'd expect. Bands of scavengers and smugglers struggle to survive, fighting off starvation and hordes of fungal zombies. While there is a serious risk of airborne infection, it requires a high concentration of spores to take hold, so a realtively large population of humans have managed to survive without masks or any other precautions.
The game's two protagonists, Joel and Ellie, reflect this duality. Joel makes his living smuggling drugs and weapons into quarantine zones, and he's apparently got an even shadier past behind him. Ellie, on the other hand, grew up at a boarding house inside a quarantine zone, fascinated with books, CDs, and other remnants of the pre-infection world.
At the start of the game, Joel is asked to help smuggle Ellie out of a quarantine zone as a favor to a dying friend. Things don't go according to plan, and the pair is forced to flee westward across the country in an attempt to find safety, traversing major American cities, suburbs, and rural areas in the process.
Along the way, you'll be scavenging for supplies and fending off attackers, the lion's share of which will actually be uninfected. In fact, don't expect The Last of Us to feature the same endless hordes of infected we've seen in every other zombie game. Though they'll certainly pop up from time to time, the infection is being treated as a backdrop for an emotionally-grounded story about humanity in a post-apocalyptic setting.
While Naughty Dog isn't ruling out future sequels if the new IP takes off, creative director Neil Druckmann told the mag that they've avoided any sort of cliffhanger ending for the first game.
The article also brought confirmation that The Last of Us will feature some sort of online multiplayer component, though Naughty Dog has yet to settle on the details.
"We're going to have some sort of online component," director Bruce Straley explained. "We're working on a bunch of ideas, but we haven't nailed anything down. We definitely know it's going to be awesome."
The Last of Us, a PS3 exclusive, is expected out sometime in late 2012 or early 2013.
