Would you say Naughty Dog is an elite developer?

The Last of Us garnered awards and nominations in a variety of categories with particular praise for its story, sound and music, graphical and artistic design, and the acting of its cast. At the 10th British Academy Video Games Awards, the game received ten nominations and went on to win five awards: Best Game, Action & Adventure, Audio Achievement, Performer and Story.^[14] The game earned thirteen nominations at the 17th Annual DICE Awards, winning ten, including Game of the Year.^[15] At IGN's Best of 2013, the game garnered thirteen nominations and went on to win ten awards, including Game of the Year,^[16] Best Overall Action-Adventure Game^[17] and Best Overall Sound.^[18]

At the 14th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, The Last of Us won Game of the Year, Best Design and Best Narrative.^[19] The game received seven nominations at the Spike VGX, with Troy Baker winning the award for Best Voice Actor and Ashley Johnson winning the award for Best Voice Actress.^[20] The game also appeared on several year-end lists of the best games of 2013, receiving Game of the Year wins from The Daily Telegraph,^[21]Good Game,^[22]Kotaku,^[23][24] and VideoGamer.com,^[25] among many others.^{[26][27][28][29]}

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_The_Last_of_Us}

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves received universal acclaim from critics for its elaborate set pieces, character design, storytelling, graphics, technical innovation, and gameplay mechanics. It received Game of the Year accolades from numerous publications and award events, and is considered to be one of the greatest video games ever made, and among the most significant titles for the seventh console generation. It also enjoyed great commercial success, with over six million copies sold worldwide. The game was followed by a sequel titled Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception in 2011, and was re-released on PlayStation 4 as part of Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection.^[2]

Wow, 15 years of consistent big hits. And I'm not even including the Jak and Daxter games on PS2. Those were well received as well. So can we finally give credit where credit is due and conclude that Naughty Dog is one of the top, top developers of our time? Elite developer sounds good to me 😎

If it makes you feel better about things. Yes, lets call them Elite developers.

lol :P

Really? We're going back to "can we agree" again?

Edit: Now that's a better title. Thanks SolidGame :)

ND and R* will always be my top 2 developers, followed by SMS, CDPR and Nintendo

Not only can we agree that ND is an Elite developer, but we can also agree on the fact that there isn't many other devs that trigger lems as much as ND does 😆

Cream of the crop. That's why they get fans of other consoles looking like this.

They have some annoying flaws but of course they are top tier.

i don't care for some aspects of their games, and they're clearly targeted at audiences with particular tastes, but across so many areas they are borderline impeccable. definitely top tier in my book

No, it's Frontier Developments plc.

Awww a thread the cows can circle jerk together in cute and no Uncharted is pretty crap good story shit gunplay

they are obviously very good at what they do(lets forget about uc3), it's a personal thing if you like their games or not, but the quality is undeniably there.

Of course ND is elite. All they do is create masterpiece after masterpiece.

Good looking games with boring mechanics. Im not a fan at all but I understand why people are drawn to them.

It used to make video games til PS3 came and they made all these godawful movie games. Its when it was in 2017 i think is when i stopped caring for Naughty Dog games as a whole. Because i realised they just werent gonna make video games anymore. But just about some jock tilting stick for 50 min up, listening to some guy babbling about something and 5 min action. I hate their games so much. Only good games they made was in PS1 and PS2 era. After that it all went downhill

@Miyomatic:

If you called... minimal gameplay a masterpiece -_- poor people

@kian82: Twist it however you'd like. The constant winning in the form of extremely high scores and GOTY awards tells us all we need to know.

didn’t see days gone metacritic score?

to be elite you have to be original,copying tomb raider wont get you that honour.

tlou was great..the 2nd not so much.

Of course they are elite. Can't wait to play Uncharted on PC 😉

The way obsessive fans pine over them and attack youtube personalities and non-fans and reviewers who give their games mediocre scores tells me one thing: a lot of ND fans are very insecure people.

I don't know, I started playing the first Uncharted and the gameplay mechanics sucked, so unless that got a lot better.

I gave up after a while with The Last of Us, just too much walking at the beggining. I'll go back to it someday.

I think they're great at the story and movie thing, but when it comes to gameplay, I'm not convinced yet.

I think Frontier Developments was the only developer working on Elite.

Hyuck hyuck

Sure, why not.

@Archangel3371:

Lolol, spot on !! ;)

I'd need to see them make a different type of game to decide this. Uncharted and TLOU are essentially the same type of game; third-person, heavily cinematic.

As of right now, I'd sooner call them a one-trick pony before I'd call them an "elite developer"....whatever that is.

But their games are quality, can't dispute that.

Lems think 343 is elite for killing Halo.

Yeah. MS should put ID to work on Halo from now on as they are now a MS studio. 343 had 2 chances and have yet to deliver a great Halo game.

Do to Halo what they did to Doom.

@Miyomatic:

So did Brokeback Mountain and that movie was godawful -_-

Compared to Phantasmagoria 2 or Blue is the Warmest Colour

High scores for being a lack of gameplay and more of a terrible movie... congratz :P

Undeniably great developers, average game designers.

Yes, of course. They are one of Sony's strongest cards.

Can’t wait to play their next game.

What is sad is they used to be actually good game developers. Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter had good game mechanics. And then someone decided.. hey thats too much fun. Lets turn it into a boring movie game series... and so Uncharted was made -_- and i hate Naughty Dog for popularizing that

They definitely have some of the most talented people in the industry. No debate there.

I think this depends on your taste in games and game style. If you like their style of game then yes, otherwise to others no.

Nope, not by my standards - at least not yet, anyway. As I said, I consider the true test of a developer's ability to be when do something different from their previous works. Naughty Dog have been doing nothing but third-person stealth action-adventure since 2007. This is why I rate the likes of Respawn Entertainment, Guerilla Games and Creative Assembly higher than them.

Let's see them try something completely different and pull it off, then we'll talk.

Current Elite developer is one and only id software.

Naughty dogs are one of the worst developers actually. never made a good game. just interested in delivering glorified hollywood movie.

Good theme tune.

The only Naughty Dog game I ever enjoyed playing was Uncharted 2. The rest were all kinda meh to me.

@wandering_halls: If you say so but totally disagree

@uninspiredcup said:

@ghosts4ever said:

never made a good game. just interested in delivering glorified hollywood movie.

Good theme tune.

Mafia is movie game done right. Last of us is movie game done wrong.

It seems a lot of people don't understand what game development actually means. Pretty silly to deny that ND is a top notch studio as far as development goes. What you think about their design chops/flexibility is a different discussion.

I get that OP is also conflating the two, but still.

No, they make games that look great but gameplay is still just so-so. They are considered better than they are because cows moo loud. Worse than Bong Joon-ho fans, sure he has made some great stuff but they'll be out there making you think his horrible or so-so films are better than they are and they gave one best picture.

They pulled some No Man's Sky making Last of US AI look more advanced than it really was because they used a highly scripted demo, and they got a free pass without ever fixing it either.

If you like very linear games with lots of pretty cutscenes and average gameplay, then yes ND are very good at making those types of games. Probably the best.

Sure you can call them whatever you want. They are def at the top of the industry in terms of mind-share, sales, and praise.

....but I really haven't liked any of their Uncharted or Uncharted-like games. The game play is really boring and makes me zzzzzzzz.

The last good game I played by ND was Jak & Daxter. Everything since has been.... an unfortunate direction from my perspective.

Naughty Dog sucks now IMO

@SolidGame_basic: Of course they are.

Every game they have made has done well, so yes. I was skeptical of the first TLOU game and it blew me away. I still haven't gotten around to the second.

yeah would love to see if they've got something else in the locker. they've polished that uncharted and tlou formula to the nth degree, it's like diminishing returns now.

as far as calibre of devs go, my litmus test is if there was a new ip announcement tomorrow would i be excited and tune in. with nd the answer is yes

Yes. For movie development.

The best they made is Way of the Warrior as you need to play it, everything else.....yeah not so much 🤣🤣🤣

Not even close to elite, unless we're talking elite crap, then yes i agree with you.