Troy Baker’s Role in Naughty Dog’s Upcoming Game Should Defy Odds

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home November 29, 2024 3 Views 6 Min Read
Troy Baker’s Role in Naughty Dog’s Upcoming Game Should Defy Odds



Like many Naughty Dog characters, The Last of Us’ Joel Miller and Uncharted’s Samuel Drake are hardly do-gooders in the classical sense. Joel can be seen as a good person if players sympathize with him not wanting Ellie Williams to die, but how he goes about that situation is controversial at best; meanwhile, Sam can be seen as a good person because of the dynamic between him and his younger brother Nathan, but the ‘long-lost brother’ trope introduced suddenly in A Thief’s End causes tension and deception. Either way, good or bad, both characters are portrayed brilliantly by Troy Baker.




It’s been a while since Naughty Dog announced it has multiple projects in development and as of now the only guaranteed game to look forward to in that lineup is a third, final chapter for The Last of Us. It was recently reported that Troy Baker will play a role in one of Naughty Dog’s upcoming games, too, and while that isn’t surprising given how much they’ve worked together it could hopefully be a different side of the actor than he’s been able to express in a Naughty Dog game before. In particular, it would be great to see Troy Baker as a Naughty Dog antagonist.

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The Last of Us wields abundant horror tropes in its action-adventure gameplay and Naughty Dog should explore that genre more indulgently.

Naughty Dog is Due a Proper Troy Baker Antagonist Role

Troy Baker is absolutely no stranger to playing villains—playing Joker, Two-Face, and Arkham Knight in Batman’s Arkhamverse alone—and yet with Joel and Sam Drake being more closely aligned as ‘good guys’ it would be fantastic to finally see the prolific actor play a Naughty Dog ne’er-do-well. Plus, with how morally questionable Joel and Sam are as two examples of complicated characters in Troy Baker’s tapestry, it would be lovely to see him play an antagonist who maybe has the same brush strokes in his palette and can be sympathized with himself.


Joel condemning the world of The Last of Us and denying it a possible cure—no matter how low the likelihood of Fireflies producing a cure is—can easily be seen as a villain’s action, for instance, and Abby Anderson of all people would agree with Joel being a villain as he killed her father to achieve his goal. Context and perspective have always been paramount to how characters are perceived in The Last of Us, whereas Uncharted is a bit more lenient as bombastic fortune-hunting romps, and hardly any characters are intended to be interpreted as standard heroes or villains.


Troy Baker and Naughty Dog are a Match Made in Heaven


That said, casting Troy Baker to be someone as unmistakably vile and irredeemable as a Rattler in The Last of Us might be an intriguing pivot. Of course, the hope would be that Troy Baker is actually right for whatever role he may have in Naughty Dog’s unannounced game and not simply be cast because of said relationship, but the actor’s demonstrable range ensures he should be able to tackle anything and Naughty Dog would know quite well by now what Troy Baker is capable of.

It might be fully predictable for Naughty Dog to flip the table and have Troy Baker play its antagonist in an upcoming game, but the developer could do worse than Troy Baker as he’s such a great actor and they have obviously garnered a working relationship that could be seamless for both parties without any awkward learning curves.

That’s why it might also be both alarming and predictable if Troy Baker was cast to be a lead protagonist in an upcoming Naughty Dog game, too. Essentially any role may be up for grabs depending on whether Naughty Dog believes he is right for it, even if it’s a supporting character. Yet, an antagonist role would allow him to stretch his performance muscles a little more like he did with Batman: Arkham Shadow’s tragic take on District Attorney Harvey Dent.


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