Naughty Dog made great games, once upon a time. They were the creators of Crash Bandicoot, one of the first 3D platformers. They made Uncharted 2, one of the best games on the PS3. Their Jak & Daxter series, despite a misstep with the tone of the second game, as well as an ill-advised kart racer, holds up incredibly well as a piece of deft platforming-adventure gaming. Then Uncharted 3 happened. All of their goodwill pissed away on an absolute disaster of a game, filled top-to-bottom with nonsensical plotlines with no resolution, areas that seemed directly copy/pasted from the second game, and what essentially amounted to character assassination of their protagonist. After that shitpile, The Last of Us was going to have to really pull off something amazing to dig themselves out of the gutter they were in.
It did not.