Bruce Straley, the game director of The Last of Us, has apologized to the team behind God of War Laufey after comments he made about modern big-budget games brought what he called uninvited and unnecessary negative attention to their work. IGN reported the apology on September 19.
The remarks appeared in a recently published Edge magazine piece in which the former Naughty Dog developer discussed the state of AAA development. Straley said, with a laugh, that the verbs and experiences being delivered in the triple-A space were, as he put it, boring, then used God of War Laufey to illustrate the point.
He described the game as technically extraordinary, saying every pixel was mindblowing and that the skill in each frame still impressed him as someone who has made games of that scale. What he was not excited by, he told Edge, was what a player actually does in it. He added that this was nothing against the God of War team, and that across triple-A development it felt to him as though there was no opportunity to inject fresh ideas.
A follow-up thread on X
The comments circulated widely on social media. Straley followed up with a thread of posts on X on September 18, both apologizing and expanding on his view of the industry.
I want to apologize to the Laufey team for dragging you all into this uninvited and unnecessary negative attention.
In the same thread he wrote that naming the game had been his mistake and that the quote was being used out of context and for clickbait. He said a journalist had asked him about the state of the industry and he had raised a lack of innovation and risk-taking in the AAA space as one concern, adding that this was not the fault of the God of War Laufey team.
Straley went on to say his fear is that players are tiring of the same verbs after twenty years, and set out a hypothesis that games are distinct from film because players are doing something rather than watching.
