The Last of Us

May 7th is still very, very far away.

As excited as I am by this trailer - and I am very excited - my enthusiasm has been tempered somewhat by the mention, on the PlayStation blog, of multiplayer. I should have known, of course, that you can't release a big-budget retail game these days without some kind of online component, but given how badly the multiplayer aspect of Uncharted 3 affected the single-player level design, I'm worried.

Hopefully this time through, +Naughty Dog will have more separation between the multiplayer and campaign design teams so The Last of Us won't suffer from Uncharted 3's single-player-levels-that-look-feel-and-play-like-multiplayer-maps issue.

But this trailer does a lot to assuage my fears. The story and cast look promising at this stage, Naughty Dog still do the best cinematics in the business, and there seems to be a much wider variety of locations than I'd expected based on material released before.

I'm wondering, though, how much my experiences with The Walking Dead, and its (superficially, at least) similar plot will affect how I approach situations in The Last of Us. I can't imagine dialogue is going to be much of an option in this one, though.