Oh so people can't have loved ones in this world?
Man Joel is such a drama queen then. I mean "rescuing your daughter?" How video gamey can you get?
The Last of Us Part II - Spoiler Thread
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Man Joel is such a drama queen then. I mean "rescuing your daughter?" How video gamey can you get?
Not gonna lie, I think there's a basic contradiction in telling a story about the hollowness of violence when the story is itself gratuitously obsessed with violence. Like you've spent an entire game keeping the player entertained and engaged by viscerally showing suffering, only to claim the story is showing that violence is hollow?
Let me throw a hypothetical at you (might be a strawman, I don't really keep up with the terms):
A single, pregnant, woman goes into labor. Her family doesn't live in the town with her. No one appointed to speak on her behalf. She goes into labor and get to the hospital. During the lead up to the delivery, she has a medical emergency and slips into a coma. The doctors have to make the decision of either saving the life of the baby and losing the mother or potentially losing the mother and the child if they fail to revive her. They decide to save the baby... A snap decision to follow the course of something they deem as the greater good in that situation. The woman dies but the child lives... later on the family of the woman is finally notified and devastated by the news. There emotions range from anger and rage to grief and mourning to appreciation for the life of the newborn...
Was anyone right in that situation? Surely that's way more nuanced than the story of a video game, but the point of the illustration is the moral ambiguity does not always fall on the lines of black and white. That was something that pushed the basis of Ellie's situation. I can completely understand Joel's motivation to save Ellie. I can also empathize with how he felt. And I can also say it was a pure act of selfishness since he potentially ruined the only potential for a cure for a deadly worldwide pandemic....
They've gone on record to state that the violence isn't supposed to be entertaining. It's supposed to be really offputting.
Exactly.
I love Joel, but I can't deny that, as these things go, he deserves for this to happen.
Alright, that's what I figured. Thanks.
Yeah, I saw that but all/most of that is stuff that was already known and includes a number of inaccurate remarks. So far it seems like outside of that 4chan post (and the other summary one that was posted a few times also from 4chan), isn't based on anything concrete. Not saying that it isn't true or won't be true, but I'm more inclined to believe it if others outside of 4chan were saying the same thing or provided proof of the epilogue events.
Be some real garbage if that's what is done to set up a third game.
In one the clips you can see her being angry with Joel for taking her out of the hospital since she had question and was thinking things could have been different .
Joel still maintain that the test was useless and none of it matter that there was no saving anyone.
IMO i leaning more to side that ellie would sacrifice herself for humanity if anyone there had given her a choice to begin with .
Correct me if im wrong but wasnt it implied in the first game that the Fireflies killed multiple 'immune' people in an attempt to reverse engineer a cure? Pretty sure it was stated in a collectible doc in the hospital.
The purpose is to make players uncomfortable. You aren't cheering the gore on. People wanted to experience the harsh and cruel world of TLOU again because they love these characters but violence is a major part of what makes the choices in the game so difficult and dark.
That's an interesting point. I don't think the whole surgeon's daughter thing has been 100% confirmed yet.
I think people are struggling to accept these plot points because from the players perspective, Joel was just looking out for his daughter-figure basically, and they killed throughout the game to survive, so them getting brutalized is just 0-100
This isn't like hypothetically, say MG gets remade, and we play as Solid Snake and kill Big Boss, a character we played as for multiple entries. In that case killing an iconic main character you played as would make sense since BB is a POS
Joel was just trying to get by lol
This isn't like hypothetically, say MG gets remade, and we play as Solid Snake and kill Big Boss, a character we played as for multiple entries. In that case killing an iconic main character you played as would make sense since BB is a POS
Joel was just trying to get by lol
In the coding doesn't it say Abby flashback surgeon?
I mean someone could still be using to create a fake leak but I think it's clear that the revenge is due to the murder when rescuing Ellie.
Look I do get it. Joel and Ellie made TLOU for me. I love their relationship and how it leads to the most questionable moment in the game. I know Joel was completely in the wrong but I cheered him on because I didn't want to see either die. When he shoots Marlene and lies to Ellie it made me rethink what just happened and why I was so happy to support someone going on a murder spree and executing a person begging for mercy.
When TLOU 2 was announced my immediate worry is Joel dying because I knew it would address what he did in the first game. Everything I read so far makes me confident in what they are doing.
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I never got them but I heard about these.
I'll be frank I wish those weren't in the game, it kinda kills the message they were going for(and seem to be expanding upon here) if you also tell the player "no don't worry it wouldn't work kill away."
I think this is one area where story and gameplay is often unaligned. The cutscenes look like it wants to show that hollowness of violence or the horror of violence but the gameplay probably won't. It's just a lack of marriage between gameplay design and story design. I don't know any game that's solved this but I don't play enough games to know. Gameplay loop is just so regularly based around violence that when the story is commentary on it, it's disjoint
missed opportunity not using the dubbed version
Troy Baker is pain!
I was excited for this game, but that's been elevated to entirely new levels now!
Personally, I hate it when the "good guys" in a story get away with atrocious acts without any reprecussions. You see the same thing in war, where the nation that wins is mostly excused of all wrong-doing because the losers were "probably 100% evil". I'm not trying to say that Joel deserves what he got, but I feel like this fits into the "cycle of hate" motif incredibly well. Anyone that denies this are the same people that grow up denying the validity in anybody else's opposing perspectives during conflict.
Bravo Naughty Dog, bravo. I'm for sure buying this game now. I'm glad you had the balls to try to show people the real effects of hatred from a mostly objective view.
Personally, I hate it when the "good guys" in a story get away with atrocious acts without any reprecussions. You see the same thing in war, where the nation that wins is mostly excused of all wrong-doing because the losers were "probably 100% evil". I'm not trying to say that Joel deserves what he got, but I feel like this fits into the "cycle of hate" motif incredibly well. Anyone that denies this are the same people that grow up denying the validity in anybody else's opposing perspectives during conflict.
Bravo Naughty Dog, bravo. I'm for sure buying this game now. I'm glad you had the balls to try to show people the real effects of hatred from a mostly objective view.
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Ellie was one of a kind. The doc you get starts with:
There were other patients but things went wrong in some way.
Genuinely asking, how else would have them convey this type of story? Walking Sim, visual novel, etc? The portrayal of violence in this world is necessary. Spilling someones guts is incredibly dark, but the world its crafted in makes sense. Is it disgusting, especially because of the high fidelity of all of it? Yes! That's the goal though. You're never meant to appreciate. So what would have them do?
Doesn't that crop up any time ND makes any new game now?
Joel is a psychopath is many ways .
He even said that back in the day he did awful things .
Him getting beat to death just fit in the world and also what he did to other characters .
People justified all his actions in TLOU1 for saving Ellie and now that has been turn on him for revenge .
I fully agree with this i don't know if i will like Abby or not but once i understand her and her action that is enough.
What do you think about these design decisions
For reference you can see that in practice here.
I think ND have gone out of their way to at least make an attempt to address the notion of ludonarrative dissonance. Like, this is in comparison to Uncharted 4, where if you successfully snap the necks of everyone in an encounter without getting detected Drake will gleefully gloat:
"Did you see that? Like a ninja!"
Only for the main villain to state this later in the game:
And it's like.... "what?"
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I would actually argue that the supposed storyline here isn't anything new to storytelling, and has been a device used in many past texts or even video games. Heck I think even CoD did it with the Russia/German aspect. The idea that one side is not as forgiven as the other because of their own atrocities is in no way a new plot device and one could even say it's a rather tired mechanism.
I think the problem here is the context of setting doesn't really allow for a storytelling device of "good and evil are but the same with different motives" to successfully work. It's a post apocalyptic world with zombies, shits already hit the fan and ethics are entirely thrown out when you are murdering those turned. Worse yet is the survival aspect that is drawn in which does challenge your views on should/should nots but ultimately survival instincts will win.
TLDR; this is kind of a trope storytelling device though I'm intrigued on the technical aspect side of things. As with any ND game the actual intricate detailing is what interests me, not the tired old plot devices.
It's a damn shame that ND has been denied the chance to be able to prove if they were capable of pulling off the Abby angle of the story, without people already making up their minds on the matter. Look, i really dislike the entire second portion of the leaks, i hate that we might get very little Joel time, and I very explicitly dislike what they are likely going to do to Ellie. I still firmly belive that ND had the right to be able to tell their own story on their own accords without everyone, including myself, deciding that we would have preferred if they went on another direction.
It's looking like the game has already been tried on the court of public opinion before Naughty Dog even got the chance to fail on the FULL game's merits.
It's looking like the game has already been tried on the court of public opinion before Naughty Dog even got the chance to fail on the FULL game's merits.
I think this is an improvement and a step in the right direction. I need to play the game to see how it is. In that it refers to how the NPC characters are reacting to these violent acts and conditions but I don't think this addresses the disconnect from the player characters gameplay and how they react and behave in cutscenes. Like in cutscenes where the act of killing causes a repulsive response in their animation or a struggle to finish it off. There's a big gap in how the weight of the action looks like its bearing on the persons mind. Like it's a player controlled character, I think it'd be worth the effort to try and bridge the gap in how you should feel for the action you input and the character is shown to feel when your control is taken away
Even before this, I wasn't planning on buying the game out of lack of time, but all this has me interested that I might drop stuff and make time for this to see how Naughty Dog try and tackle all of this stuff. I may even buy it just as a, hats off for doing what y'all must have known would be divisive.
I'm hearing both "the transphobic stuff is a 4chan narrative to make people upset" and "the transphobic stuff is totally in there and shitty". So I don't even know who to believe anymore.
FWIW Spec Ops The Line does this and is fucking awesome.
The more I read the more I become disappointed and the more convinced they should have left it at TLOU1.
Almost seems like the everything about this game was just centred around shock value.
You're wrong. There were no other immune people like Ellie, that collectible everyone seems to focus on actually says literally the opposite of what people have made up to justify Joel's actions.
Almost seems like the everything about this game was just centred around shock value.
You're wrong. There were no other immune people like Ellie, that collectible everyone seems to focus on actually says literally the opposite of what people have made up to justify Joel's actions.
I think this is again, something they went out of their way to attempt. Like this is Ellie in an early demo cinematic:
this is Ellie in-game:
Like ofc the in-game animation is faster for gameplay reasons but I don't think there's a difference when it comes to intention. Ellie isn't enjoying this, it's a brutal thing that she feels like she has to do.
Random...when its everything but....
The girls dad is murdered. Her family + friends are also murdered. Ones she's grown up around her whole life. A daughter who lives in a world where there is no structured government and, when left to your own devices, where survival has to be fought for with tooth and nail because it's literally kill or be killed in the majority of the world. Where backstabbing a person over some bartering goods could mean your life (i.e. Joel and Tess in the opening chapter of TLOU)....context man...It's not that far-fetched in this world they have crafted that someone who's young and impressionable, either sees or learns that her father and crew were massacred and the potential result leading to her taking a revengeful course to get the killer (assuming that is her true motivation, we don't really know fully...)
Yeah same. I'm already spoiled, but I think I can wait on this. With times as they are, I don't really want to invest time into this. Hell I barely got through Half-Life Alyx, some parts of it hit a little hard living here in NYC during a pandemic. From what I've seen it's all about try hard "wanna be RDR2 R*". I'm sure they'll execute, we've only seen snippets of major cutscenes without all the stuff in between.
Animal Crossing and MW with my boys till things hopefully look cheerier. Betting there's a solid upscale for the PS5. I'll dip my toes in then.
Crossfit lol the amount of roids in her body would kill a horse!
CrossFit Games | The Fittest on Earth
games.crossfit.com
But please, continue being a judgmental asshole
Damn! People getting mad about this but I'm respecting what Naughty Dog is attempting here. This looks good. This game looks way more interesting to me now. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that can accomplish a marriage of narrative intent and gameplay, just need the funding. My bad for any inaccuracies I make in reference to the game. I consume very little pre-release content of any media I consume. Vast majority of movies I watch, I just show up and watch, no trailers, no interviews, often not even a synopsis. So anything I say in reference to The Last of Us is from a background of ignorance
Probably... its called anavar mate she 100% takes roids females bodies dont work that way champ!
Some of the footage they showed have conversations between NPCs calling each other by name or like they know each other while Ellie is killing them. It would make sense that someone would come back for revenge.
I won't judge the game just by the plot points, have to play it to get the full experience.
I won't judge the game just by the plot points, have to play it to get the full experience.
CrossFit Games | The Fittest on Earth
But please, continue being a judgmental asshole
How am i judging her? Did I imply taking steroids is a bad thing?
While i can appreciate the genral overaching themes that the story seems to be getting at here as suggested in the thread, personally i am tied to the characters built in the world as much as the story itself and obviously having played TLOU, i am attached to Joel and Ellie as characters more so than other in this world because we see this world through them. Yes, i agree that Joel is definitely a flawed character and objectively he leans more towards violence as a first reaction then he should.
However regardless of the context that is established - to see Abby kill Joel and then assume control of her to hunt Ellie down and kill her... It just rubs me wrong regardless of whether the characters deserve it within the context TLOU2 establishes. Like - i can understand these characters dying in this game but to play as the character that kills Joel and then asks me to take control and hunt Ellie down because she killed my gang while escaping capture and then being asked to kill her does not have me enthused.
I will still pick this up eventually but it is just not Day 1 for me anymore.
However regardless of the context that is established - to see Abby kill Joel and then assume control of her to hunt Ellie down and kill her... It just rubs me wrong regardless of whether the characters deserve it within the context TLOU2 establishes. Like - i can understand these characters dying in this game but to play as the character that kills Joel and then asks me to take control and hunt Ellie down because she killed my gang while escaping capture and then being asked to kill her does not have me enthused.
I will still pick this up eventually but it is just not Day 1 for me anymore.
No they can not... fuck me some people really do live in a fantasy world!!!
You're good I was just clarifying the intention. I don't think any other game this gen has attempted to make us uncomfortable with violence. Like ofc people are gonna have fun with the game regardless of it's intention, we're gonna get high res gifs of incredibly violent acts and people will think "wow that looks awesome." But the overall intention is basically to make us as uncomfortable as possible. When the second teaser came out, a lot of people were offput not just because of the excessive violence, but because of how little context there was to the violence itself. Violence without context is just that, violence, but they're really trying hard to contextualize the violence for the sake of having something to say. In ways only a video game can.
We have no idea if she is hunting ellie down or the reason .
There a lot of fake spoilers going around along with the leaks .
We do know her and Ellie fight but we don't know how it happen and the reason for it .
For all we know it could be Ellie that started it .
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