The Last of Us digital download lets you start playing sooner

The Last of Us will give PS3 gamers a small taste of PS4's new accessibility features. Like many recent retail releases on PS3, the game will be available for download via PlayStation Network at launch. However, you won't have to dread having to download dozens of gigabytes at once before you can start playing.

Naughty Dog's creative director Neil Druckmann and The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley told Game Informer that once you've downloaded fifty percent of the game, you'll be able to start playing. It isn't quite the instant gratification promised by Sony for PS4, but it's not too easy to retrofit new features onto old machines.

It's likely that the retail downloads will work similarly to the demo press received yesterday. Our digital copies of the game had a small initial download. Remaining data was then downloaded while the executable was running. Perhaps the PSN version of the full game will work in a similar way?