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Skippy McPants posted:It wouldn't be worth it even if they'd made the best game in history. Thankfully, we can all agree that they did.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:02
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davejk posted:There isn't really a hero in this game. Lev and Dina are the only characters who even survive the ending without an anger-fuelled body count in the hundreds. Lev pretty much does.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:03
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Dan Didio posted:That would be hugely deficit of drama. The drama of the scene generally comes from a place of character and there really wasn't much drama in it in the first place, mostly just shock value. This game over and over again in so many cutscenes basically says "if you try to spare someone they will come back and kill you" and not just in the big story moments, but, for example, whenever Ellie relents on killing a WLF she has a knife to the throat of, said WLF tries to kill her anyway.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:03
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Oxxidation posted:one of these things is not like the other It was some Korean streamer, I think the clip has been posted in this thread, but yeah, he either beat the game or just got past Joel's scene, I've heard conflicting reports, but he just has this... absolutely done look on his face, he's not mad, he's not crying or like full of emotion. He just sorta gets the game disk out, tries to snap it, doesn't work, grabs a pair of scissors and just snips both discs, and he just looks like he couldn't give less of a poo poo. Fake Edit: appears it's just after the Joel Scene. https://clips.twitch.tv/AuspiciousPlausibleMagpiePunchTrees
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Jun 22, 2020 14:03
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Panzeh posted:This game over and over again in so many cutscenes basically says "if you try to spare someone they will come back and kill you" So? Panzeh posted:The drama of the scene generally comes from a place of character and there really wasn't much drama in it in the first place, mostly just shock value. You think a scene of Tommy, cluelessly pissing, would be more dramatic?
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Jun 22, 2020 14:05
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There's no sugarcoating I can apply to "if you think the game deserves to be snapped in two after Joel's scene, you should read some drat literature".
Char fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 14:06
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:I honestly don't understand what people wanted this game to be. I think people wanted a continuation of the Joel & Ellie in post-apocalyptic America story but done in an interesting way.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:07
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plasm posted:I think people wanted a continuation of the Joel & Ellie in post-apocalyptic America story but done in an interesting way. I've good news for them. Char posted:There's no sugarcoating I can apply to "if you think the game deserves to be snapped in two after Joel's scene, you should read some drat literature". Seeing stuff like that and the petitions and people like, screeching at actors in the game on Twitter just makes me feel deeply sad inside, I don't quite know why.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:08
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Dan Didio posted:So? It would not have strained my credulity that people who are good beating a guy to death with a golf club would have all these qualms about killing someone they have at their mercy who's clearly not cowed by this display.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:09
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Onmi posted:It was some Korean streamer, I think the clip has been posted in this thread, but yeah, he either beat the game or just got past Joel's scene, I've heard conflicting reports, but he just has this... absolutely done look on his face, he's not mad, he's not crying or like full of emotion. He just sorta gets the game disk out, tries to snap it, doesn't work, grabs a pair of scissors and just snips both discs, and he just looks like he couldn't give less of a poo poo. that streamer is an idiot and you're none too sharp yourself for trying to use them as an example of a reasonable reaction to a scene in a video game
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Jun 22, 2020 14:10
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Oxxidation posted:that streamer is an idiot and you're none too sharp yourself for trying to use them as an example of a reasonable reaction to a scene in a video game yeah i kinda agree with that- there's things i don't like about it but i got through it and that's a bizarre reaction to have to it
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Jun 22, 2020 14:12
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Panzeh posted:It would not have strained my credulity that people who are good beating a guy to death with a golf club would have all these qualms about killing someone they have at their mercy who's clearly not cowed by this display. ^ One of the reasons I was sour on the first game was I felt it too often relied on contrivance to drive the drama and hammer home an already obvious point. TLoU2 has that same problem but dialed up to the nth degree.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:12
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Char posted:There's no sugarcoating I can apply to "if you think the game deserves to be snapped in two after Joel's scene, you should read some drat literature". I don't think of any of us have snapped the game in two so good to know? I've never destroyed a game, even lovely games I have. I have Lunar Dragon Song and I didn't break that. I'm not saying that's what the game deserves, I'm saying that is something that happened. Laughter and just turning off the game are far more common and far more reasonable. Dan Didio posted:I've good news for them. Well, the latter is because it's people who had no control over anything getting harrassed for poo poo outside of their control. And it's always lovely to see people get harassed. For the former it's because something you like and formed an emotional attachment to is not only not shared by people, it's that those people find it to be tripe. That the emotions you felt, were not shared by others and they are in fact mocking it, making jokes about it, treating it as grand comedy, or having such an utterly revolted reaction that anything else is preferable. It isn't just saying "I dislike this art" it's saying "This art to me is so loving terrible, that the people who made it should feel ashamed, and those who like, like something that doesn't deserve to exist." Oxxidation posted:that streamer is an idiot and you're none too sharp yourself for trying to use them as an example of a reasonable reaction to a scene in a video game I'm not saying that's a reasonable reaction, I was just bringing it up as a reaction I'd seen.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:12
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seriously folks, don't try to snap discs. those things don't break clean, they go off like bombs source: me, at nine years old, experimentally trying to break a Tomba! disc that had been scratched beyond all repair
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Jun 22, 2020 14:14
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Panzeh posted:It would not have strained my credulity that people who are good beating a guy to death with a golf club would have all these qualms about killing someone they have at their mercy who's clearly not cowed by this display. I'm not sure what your point is here, all of this is addressed in the game and it forms a small, but significant part of the arc of the characters it involves, the fact that they left Ellie and Tommy alive is a part of who they are and it's a part of their characters. They didn't play The Last Of Us 2 in an earlier scene, they're not trying to do a speedrun. They don't know what's going to happen, they make a choice based on their moral code and their position and it ends up costing them sometimes. Onmi posted:Well, the latter is because it's people who had no control over anything getting harrassed for poo poo outside of their control. And it's always lovely to see people get harassed. I think it's just that I find the whole way of acting dishonest and pretty emotionally stunted, but who knows.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:14
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I haven't played the game (and I'm probably not going to any time soon since I never got around to getting a PS4), but I got really interested in the reactions and nature of discussions about this after reading/watching a few reviews, especially since I think it's becoming a really good example of how people critique and experience media in 2020. Was the story of TLoU2 an interesting story to tell? One of the common things I see from people criticising the story is the acknowledgement that revenge stories that end in the character choosing not to take their revenge can work, so it's not as if this was impossible from the get go. I generally find zombie apocalypse stories really existentially depressing, since even when there are survivors, there's often still a sort of hope for a magical place or a long shot to make things go back to normal, rather so the ending of TLoU going in a direction of "it's more important to live with what we have rather than taking constant long shots" was a great story of emotional acceptance and moving on, even if that involved violent rejection and deceit rather than clear consent. So having a sequel that posits "well, you can make that choice, but you can't escape the consequences of how you made it" is an interesting starting point. This starts to fall apart when it comes to the execution of the story, for aspects like pacing, characterization, writing, direction, etc. I think some of this is also limited by the medium, but there are games that have taken the consequences of violence in gameplay and integrated it back into the story - Dishonoured comes to mind here, since the ending and gameplay of that is heavily affected by how many people you kill. So from all the responses around "why was Ellie ok with killing hundreds of people but not Abby" - well, yes, that can be explained in the story, but if that internal tension isn't represented in the gameplay in some way then it starts to weaken the characterization, which then makes the execution of the story that much harder. Which makes the lack of change in gameplay a bit puzzling, since if this is meant to be a story-driven game, then why not have the gameplay change to reflect the story? There's also been criticisms of how the gameplay hasn't really evolved since TLoU, although what I've read has focused around if it's fun or if it's innovative (which I think is fair, HL1 and HL2 had a similar gap in time between them, and look at the evolution there), but I think there's a thread to tug on about if the gameplay style of TLoU that supported that story needed to change more drastically to support the story of TLoU2. If you treat the story as something that happens between gameplay segments, then I don't think any game story is going to reach its full potential, and I'm curious to know how much TLoU2 comes across as "an interactive movie with a few shooting breaks" as opposed to a more tightly cohesive story that makes full use of the medium. Is that a fair take on this, or am I totally off? As I said, I haven't played it, so a lot of the points above are things I'd like to know more about rather than things I think are definitely the case in TLoU2.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:15
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The whole 'Ellie kills a group of people, but not Abbie' thing would feel a lot more like a valid criticism if they were Fireflies or WLF or something rather than slavers who are actively trying to kill and enslave Ellie from the jump. It's not like she was killing her way through scores of people who were otherwise doing nothing. She's not killing them out of some obsessive need for revenge or catharsis. It's a really different situation and I think it makes sense that the villains in the final chapter are a lot less murky or meaningful or even 'relatable'. Shirkelton fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 14:17
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Hobo posted:Which makes the lack of change in gameplay a bit puzzling, since if this is meant to be a story-driven game, then why not have the gameplay change to reflect the story? There's also been criticisms of how the gameplay hasn't really evolved since TLoU, although what I've read has focused around if it's fun or if it's innovative (which I think is fair, HL1 and HL2 had a similar gap in time between them, and look at the evolution there), but I think there's a thread to tug on about if the gameplay style of TLoU that supported that story needed to change more drastically to support the story of TLoU2. If you treat the story as something that happens between gameplay segments, then I don't think any game story is going to reach its full potential, and I'm curious to know how much TLoU2 comes across as "an interactive movie with a few shooting breaks" as opposed to a more tightly cohesive story that makes full use of the medium. It depends on what you think the game's message is, really. If it's just meant to be saying "look at how awful these characters are" then it works. If it's meant to be chastising you, the player, for participating in their awfulness, it doesn't work, because you have no choice but to do that due to the absence of non-lethal options and a number of scripted encounters where you have to kill your way out (or set the game to easy and run past everything, but I don't think that counts).
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Jun 22, 2020 14:20
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Dan Didio posted:The whole 'Ellie kills a group of people, but not Abbie' thing would feel a lot more like a valid criticism if they were Fireflies or WLF or something rather than slavers who are actively trying to kill and enslave Ellie from the jump. Yeah the Rattlers are basically characterized as ruthlessly evil assholes from the start and if that's the gist people get from it, it can't be from what's actually in the game. Dan Didio posted:They don't know what's going to happen, they make a choice based on their moral code and their position and it ends up costing them sometimes. See, I buy Ellie going out to Seattle on a revenge run because she does not discriminate the same way(though the game never really gives her a chance to in any moment while she's in Seattle). I do not buy people with this kind of moral code going all the way to Jackson to get Joel and make it slow with a golf club in the first place.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:22
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I cannot believe the extent to which this thread has improved. can I go back and vote 5
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Jun 22, 2020 14:24
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Panzeh posted:Yeah the Rattlers are basically characterized as ruthlessly evil assholes from the start and if that's the gist people get from it, it can't be from what's actually in the game. The main issue with the Joel one is... it's been years. Like... I would accept that Abby and friends set off, fire in their belly, hunting down, realized they had no leads, wind up just... dicking around... and then it's like... Eh? you give up, like you maybe go "Oh yeah we'll go after him, like ya know, when we get a lead." And if it was just complete accident because they weren't even looking, and then Joel saves Abby, same as in-game, except she's actually conflicted about killing him, because it's been year, and like... it's hard to stay mad, you need a constant influx of the Mad energies to be the mad. And he just saved her life. Like a little hesitation, a little confirmation that he's the Joel she's looking for, any of that would have been nice.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:27
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Panzeh posted:I do not buy people with this kind of moral code going all the way to Jackson to get Joel and make it slow with a golf club in the first place. Again, most of them are pretty content to turn back, it's Abby's obsession, which continually rears it's head and makes her life a living hell, that drives them to actually do the deed, and Abby has a fairly strong moral compass outside of that and isn't someone who's willing to just murder innocent people. She's a complicated gal. Murdering Joel is probably her lowest point morally aside from maybe the theatre confrontation, and again, the story goes to great pains to explain why someone like her would do those things. There's a difference between being obsessed with revenge and willing to indulge in sadism for that purpose and being willing to kill innocent people in a cold blooded, pragmatic fashion. Onmi posted:The main issue with the Joel one is... it's been years. Like... I would accept that Abby and friends set off, fire in their belly, hunting down, realized they had no leads, wind up just... dicking around... and then it's like... Eh? you give up, like you maybe go "Oh yeah we'll go after him, like ya know, when we get a lead." This is actually what happens in the game. Shirkelton fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 14:28
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Dan Didio posted:The whole 'Ellie kills a group of people, but not Abbie' thing would feel a lot more like a valid criticism if they were Fireflies or WLF or something rather than slavers who are actively trying to kill and enslave Ellie from the jump. it's not just the group in california though, it's everyone she killed before to get to abby that's a 100+ people, which is also a specifically a video game problem to be fair
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Jun 22, 2020 14:32
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grieving for Gandalf posted:I cannot believe the extent to which this thread has improved. can I go back and vote 5 Yes I'm extremely happy with the current state of the thread, and how much it has removed.  But I'm watching you...
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Jun 22, 2020 14:33
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Panzeh posted:Yeah, I think that's by far the weakest part of the story. ND drew these societies and these people who have absolutely no problem killing the poo poo out of whoever they percieve to be their enemies but this is a discussion that happens in that room. It's weird because the first game already kinda dealt with this during the Winter section. The Nolan North Cannibal Crew are the remnants of a group that Joel and Ellie decimated. Somehow they get the basic description of "older man and young girl" as being responsible for all the bloodshed even though they left no witnesses iirc. I haven't played it since release so I'm hazy on the details. But either way the lesson is "dead men tell no tales" and not "anyone seeking revenge should dig two graves."
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Jun 22, 2020 14:35
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am0kgonzo posted:it's not just the group in california though, it's everyone she killed before to get to abby Both groups attack her first and I don't think Ellie really has any moral qualms with, I guess you could call it proactive self defence. I do think people are specifically talking about the Rattlers when they make that criticism, though. She's also not particularly interested in giving the WLF the benefit of the doubt, for obvious reasons.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:36
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The whole sequence with the Rattlers felt like a really weird inclusion. I assumed they'd do something like have Ellie and Abby work together to escape them and end up realising that revenge isn't worth it in the process, but no, they escape them and then still fight to the death on the beach. The Rattlers are just there to provide another set of combat sequences before you get to the last cutscene and they don't materially affect anything.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:41
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davejk posted:The whole sequence with the Rattlers felt like a really weird inclusion. I assumed they'd do something like have Ellie and Abby work together to escape them and end up realising that revenge isn't worth it in the process, but no, they escape them and then still fight to the death on the beach. The Rattlers are just there to provide another set of combat sequences before you get to the last cutscene and they don't materially affect anything. Yeah. Though, i'll say i feel the game is a bit too long as is.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:45
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I think a big problem is that they don't really have any introduction, and you learn a lot about them really, really fast while there's a lot else going on. It's a weird thing where that section of the game feels like it should have been longer, but it can't really.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:46
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Dan Didio posted:I'm pretty sure you haven't actually played the game. Can we leave this rebuttal behind? You're in the leaks thread. It's specifically the discussion thread for people who didn't mind getting spoiled — many of whom will never play the game — to discuss the game. We're quarantined over here to not bother the whole other thread of people diligently playing the game and sharing their reactions with each other. You can accuse people of not playing the game over there. In this thread, it's a nice bonus if people played the game, not a requirement for discussion.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:52
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https://twitter.com/bafeldman/status/1274805454724632578?s=21
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Jun 22, 2020 14:52
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Dan Didio posted:I think a big problem is that they don't really have any introduction, and you learn a lot about them really, really fast while there's a lot else going on. Yeah, i don't know, I feel like their inclusion and the way the whole thing played out was the writers wanting you to have something you can feel good about Ellie doing, because going on ride 4 revenge 2 actually did a lot of good for everybody else except Ellie herself.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:53
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doingitwrong posted:Can we leave this rebuttal behind? You're in the leaks thread. It's specifically the discussion thread for people who didn't mind getting spoiled — many of whom will never play the game — to discuss the game. If you're straight up not understanding the roles of characters and why they're there, or getting basic facts about the game's story wrong as people in here have done repeatedly, I think it's germane to establish wether or not you've actually got a full understanding of what happens in the game. Especially given that most of this thread has been treated like a game of telephone with spoiler leaks.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:55
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Dan Didio posted:If you're straight up not understanding the roles of characters and why they're there, or getting basic facts about the game's story wrong as people in here have done repeatedly, I think it's germane to establish wether or not you've actually got a full understanding of what happens in the game. Everybody is free to interpret the game as they like, as their world views and values differ from your own. What won't be tolerated, and I'm not saying it's happening, is attacks on other posters if their opinion is different to yours.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:58
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Unless their opinions are bigoted, right? We’re still cool to dunk on those losers?
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Jun 22, 2020 15:05
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Skippy McPants posted:Unless their opinions are bigoted, right? We’re still cool to dunk on those losers? Hopefully, no one would post those opinions and those that do wouldn't be allowed to post in the thread, to begin with.
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Jun 22, 2020 15:10
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This is pretty cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tero0sRNi8U&t=559s There's a lot of very talented people at Naughty Dog, this game definitely could have been something different.
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Jun 22, 2020 15:13
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Skippy McPants posted:Unless their opinions are bigoted, right? We’re still cool to dunk on those losers? Hopefully noone would be stupid enough to post poo poo like that ITT.
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Jun 22, 2020 15:16
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To me having a group of insanely evil assholes who have to be slaughtered en-masse seems at odds with the 'revenge bad, consider the humanity of your enemies' theme. Like what if Joel's killer happened to be from one of the groups of irredeemable fuckers? Guess cross country revenge would've been good and cool then, it was just Ellie's bad luck that the killer was not a completely awful person?
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Jun 22, 2020 15:17
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Irony Be My Shield posted:To me having a group of insanely evil assholes who have to be slaughtered en-masse seems at odds with the 'revenge bad, consider the humanity of your enemies' theme. Like what if Joel's killer happened to be from one of the groups of irredeemable fuckers? Guess cross country revenge would've been good and cool then, it was just Ellie's bad luck that the killer was not a completely awful person? I don't think it's meant to be a simple, opaque reading.
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Jun 22, 2020 15:25
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