The Last of Us was certainly a huge success for HBO, achieving excellent reception from critics and audiences alike. Considered by many to be the best game adaptation ever made, the series reached great numbers and already has a second season confirmed. . One of the biggest criticisms about the series was the lack of action and infected throughout the nine episodes. Now, Craig Mazin, producer of the adaptation, spoke on the subject.
Craing Mazin talks about lack of action and infected in The Last of Us
During a press conference, Craig Mazin stated that the focus of the adaptation was to emphasize the power of relationships present in the plot, with the team looking to find meaning to deliver moments of action.
In the end, we tried to emphasize the power of relationships and tried to find meaning in moments of action. The series has less action than some people wanted because we couldn’t necessarily find meaning for a good portion of it, or there was concern that it would be repetitive.
The producer also spoke about the process of adapting a work that appeared in video games, citing the difficulty of transforming something that was made around the gameplay into a series.
Part of the adaptation process is trying to figure out how to take the source material, which was built around the gameplay, and port it into a passive medium. Much of the gameplay is centered on [NPCs] that you need to sidestep, avoid, stealth kill, or just face head-on
To complete, Craig Mazin made it clear that the series had the intention of “nerfing” Joel, since in a game the combat ends up resulting in a very high amount of dead enemies. For the adaptation, the producers believed that so much killing would not make sense.
NPCs were invaders, cannibals, FEDRA or infected. So there’s a lot of fighting. I don’t know what your final kill count is in typical ‘The Last of Us’ gameplay, but it’s in the triple digits for sure