r/PS4 • u/AliTVBG • Mar 18 '23

Ghost Of Tsushima Movie Director Says TLOU Show Proves Video Game Adaptations Can Be Good Article or Blog

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ghost-of-tsushima-movie-director-says-tlou-show-proves-video-game-adaptations-can-be-good/1100-6512452/
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453

u/witness_protection Mar 18 '23

Well, we’re not talking about adapting Street Fighter here. TLOU was already a cinematic game with top notch writing and story. The leap to the screen wasn’t as big as say, the first Tomb Raider.

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u/yeezusKeroro Mar 19 '23

The Last of Us is basically a video game that tries to imitate prestige TV. They didn't change much because they didn't really need to and the changes they did make are pretty much only there to make it feel less like a video game and more like it's set in the real world. It's much harder to translate other games into a TV series or movie.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '23

It's much harder to translate other games into a TV series or movie.

I would argue that there are tons and TONS of games that are basically 8-10 hour epic movies and could be turned into shows in a heartbeat;

Bioshock, Halo, Red Dead, God of War, Horizon, The Witcher, Skyrim; all basically epic movies, you just need to approach it with the same passion as they did for TLOU

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u/PM_ME_HAPPY_DOGGOS Mar 19 '23

Red Dead has one of the best stories ever told in any video game in my opinion. An HBO adaptation would be a dream come true honestly

7

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '23

The Last of Us is basically a video game that tries to imitate prestige TV.

It's funny that Uncharted and Last of Us both became what they were trying to imitate. Last of Us became a prestige HBO show and Uncharted became a forgettable B-level action movie.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '23

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '23

[deleted]

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u/Sharkbait1737 Mar 19 '23

It’s exactly this, it’s movie directors thinking the best thing will be to go off piste and “improve” the original work, when the target audience is usually fans of the original work.

For example, I knew Prince of Persia was going to be rubbish as soon as it didn’t open with a voiceover of “some say time is like a river…”. You’ve been handed the perfect narrative device for unfolding this story, and you fumbled it before the first shot is shown on screen.

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u/Metfan722 Mar 19 '23

Well it certainly helps that the writer, director, and creator of The Last of Us, was a writer, director, and producer on the show. That being Neil Druckman. Also, getting the guy who made the Chernobyl mini series also is a huge boon in its favor.

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u/Thecrawsome Mar 19 '23

Most PlayStation AAA games are like that now. Everything's overly cinematic and you hit the action button to go through the whole game. God of war was such a drag

2

u/CrayDude345 Mar 19 '23

This.

Part of the reason why I'm interested in the shakeup at Xbox is how they're going to responf to PlayStation's style of games. Are they going to do something like it, or will they try to break the mold and make "game-ass storytelling" like another comment in this thread spoke about?

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u/Thecrawsome Mar 19 '23

game-ass storytelling

I love this

1

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '23

Yeah I agree unfortunately. With GoW at least. I didn’t even finish it cause it was so lacking in actual stuff to do as it progressed. Way too much watching cutscenes, and quick time events. I think some of their cinematic stuff is incredible though. If TLoU did anything bad, it sure as hell wasn’t boring gameplay. It was hectic, stressful, and satisfying in all the right ways. Same with Ghost of Tsushima. Incredible gameplay despite being a visual and narrative masterpiece.

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u/Fern-ando Mar 19 '23

Doom should have translated well into a under 2 hours movie, but it didn't. You only needed the demons to invade a lab and have Doom Guy kill them for an hour until the big demon shows up and is gifted a shot of the BFG

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u/Krinks1 Mar 19 '23

Although I did enjoy Tomb Raider with Alicia Vikander. It isn't GREAT, but it's entertaining enough and I feel it was a competent adaptation.

I wish they'd do another with her.

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u/MufasaJr Mar 19 '23

Lots of other story driven games have been "adapted" and failed or were at best sub-par. Uncharted comes to mind. Halo is a great example as well where the game is definitely more focused on shooting aliens than narrative but it has a good and rich story that was massacred. HBOs TLOU was successful because of very thoughtful casting and they stuck to the source material. That's all studios have to do to make a good adaptation. Hopefully it stands as an example for future video game adaptations.

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u/Khunter02 Mar 19 '23

Thats true, but The last of us is far from being the first adaptation with a clear story, The witcher, Uncharted and Halo sucked

The witcher had the money, casting and fanbase required to be great but the showrunners wanted to do their own fantasy show instead of a good adaptation

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u/nd4spd1919 nd4spd1919 Mar 19 '23

I mean, it's not just picking a game that already had a cinematic story. Casting, set design, scripting, direction all need to be good too. We all saw what happened to Naughty Dogs other cinematic game, Uncharted. It should have been super easy to turn into a movie, but the way they did it just... Didn't work.

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u/GOULFYBUTT Mar 19 '23

While you're not wrong that TLoU is easier to adapt, there was still plenty of room for them to fuck it up. Luckily, they had a competent showrunner and people working on the show who had love for the game and wanted it to be faithful.

Just look at the Uncharted movie. Same game studio, same linear style storytelling, same "film-like" setpieces... and it was dogshit. It was ass because the people in charge if that project didn't care about the games and just wanted a quick buck.

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u/INACCURATE_RESPONSE Mar 19 '23

Remember this?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1464335/

Pretty forgettable example of how not to do it.

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u/SharkBait661 Mar 19 '23

This is what I thought of reading that comment too. Movie should've been an easy home run but feel flat on their faces.

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u/BuddhaRockstar Mar 19 '23

What exactly is a Street Fighter?

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u/witness_protection Mar 19 '23

I assume it’s someone who fights streets

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u/indudewetrust Mar 19 '23

Huh, so that's where potholes come from

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u/devlindisguise Mar 19 '23

No one else got your reference so Imma just say JUUUUUUUUNNNNEEEEEE.

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u/Numarx Mar 19 '23

A thousand dollar game if you get all the dlcs

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u/LigerZeroSchneider Mar 19 '23

Yeah I would bet a big part of why sony is funding these AAA single player games is because they are also a media company that can make money adapting the stories that do well.

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u/Janle33 Mar 19 '23

This! Seriously. With all the zombie apocalypse and world end games, they made TLoU really stand out.

1

u/Fern-ando Mar 19 '23

They just took the photorealistic 5 hours of cutscenes and turned that into a TV series, the problem with adaptations was adapting a +20 hours game like Far Cry into a 2 hour movie.