Has The Last of Us 2 Reached the Uncanny Valley with Its Motion Capture?

The Last of Us 2’s impressive impressive trailer at Sony’s E3 2018 press conference didn’t just give fans a taste of proper gameplay—it revealed Ellie’s mature look and introduced Dina, who is based on a real-life face model.

Dina’s model is Cascina Caradonna, who just posted a video on her YouTube channel that shows how much work went into making her digital counterpart look just like her. Apparently, the original model was fairly basic, but Naughty Dog put in a ton of work to making it look as close to her as possible.

The concept of the uncanny valley refers to the eerie feelings in observers that view humanoid objects that appear almost (but no quite) like real humans.

According to Naughty Dog’s creative director, Neil Druckmann, The Last of Us 2 is a game born from revenge.

“The first game, at its very core, was trying to tap into this primal feeling that a parent has for their child,” he said. “This unconditional love. How do we create a game that captures that? This game tells a very complementary story.”

“We wanted to deal with this primal feeling,” he continued. ”I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where someone pushed you, or you saw a video of someone torturing an animal, and even for a split second, you’ve thought: I want to make this person pay. And that’s part of the research that we’ve done.”

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In The Last of Us 2, the world is still recovering from the infection that destroyed most of humanity, leaving zombie-like creatures lurking in the shows of an unstable society.

“With society broken down, how far would you go for justice?” Druckmann said. “How much would it consume you? How much would it take away from your humanity? How much would it destroy your relationships? Those are all interesting questions for us to explore.”

The Last of Us 2 is set to launch exclusively for the PlayStation 4, although there is currently no set release date.

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