As someone who basically grew up with Naughty Dog and being an intense fanboy of theirs, this is just really sad. My first Playstation game I ever played was the first Crash Bandicoot game, where it was just a simple zany, cartoony platformer that you could enjoy for hours on end. There was no sociopolitical messages, no SJW pandering, nothing. It was a bandicoot who spun animals out of the way and had a guy with a giant N on his forehead trying to capture him to create a super soldier. Video game companies today believe that by adding "realistic" characteristics or talk about "real world" issues in games that it will be more "enjoyable" for the player or will make video games finally be known as "art", but most of the time, I dunno, the things as simple as the original 4 Crash Bandicoot games come off as way more creative, enjoyable, and worth the money.
I remember subscribing to Playstation Underground, where they would send you discs of behind the scenes footage at some of the games you bought. I got one for I believe Crash Team Racing, and I remember seeing Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin leading a team of well-intentioned nerds on a game that was supposed to be FUN. No politics, no pandering, didn't care if they sexualized anything, didn't care if they made inneundos kids couldn't get, they were thinking about what the fans wanted. In that footage too you can see the developers just goofing off like college kids when they did team bonding exercises (such as riding go karts or playing hockey). Compare that with Druckmann being an egotistical big-wig asshole, where he only cares about himself rather than the consumers or even his own subordinates. Naughty Dog for him is just Druckmann Studios. For Gavin and Rubin, it was the entire team that mattered, and they even showed that by saying that their various dog mascots were the real leaders of the studios. Where the hell is this today in any Western game developer? Or any media for that matter? It's certainly a product of a by-gone era. I stopped caring about ND after the first Uncharted game.
I also played The Last of Us (since it came with my PS3), and I was incredibly bored. Maybe it's just because I prefer games not to be "cinematic" experiences. Ellie was also so annoying. At the end of the day, I think I stopped right around the time you were supposed to sneak around these bandits and not get sniped. I found myself getting sleepy just playing that part and I didn't care to finish the rest. To this day, I still break out Crash Bandicoot or the first 3 Jak games and play the crap out of them. To me, that was what defined ND. Not this garbage. Druckmann deserves to get every ounce of backlash he can get and it sucks to say, but ND should really quit. They made the mistake of, just like everybody else, turning too "how do you do, fellow kids?" in trying to stay relevant.
