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It's coming up to 8pm, and the crowd assembled in an LA warehouse for Sony's latest showcase event is slowly starting to thin. Evan Wells, a member of the Naughty Dog team since the days of Crash Bandicoot, is also making for the exit. He was up 'til 3am working through the demo of The Last of Us that we're being presented with today, and now he's heading back to stage and capture the screenshots that will accompany this morning's previews. Wells might be senior - in what's coming up to 15 years at the studio, he's worked his way up to studio director - but he's not above grunt work. The reason it's Wells that's taking the shots, and taking on a job that'd normally be doled out to a less experienced member of the team is because, like all of his colleagues at the studio, he's a perfectionist. It's a perfectionism that's always been evident in Naughty Dog's games, especially so with the PlayStation 3's Uncharted series. Making adventures that are so breezy doesn't happen without hard work, and an awful lot of it.
But it's also a perfectionism that in the past has perhaps not left much room for the player. Uncharted 3, for all its indubitable splendor, was a game that was famously fussy whenever you dared delve from the script, and one whose strong sense of cinema sometimes detracted from the freedom that's expected of a video game.
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