Videogames: "No E3 for you!" edition.

[briantw]

3 hours ago, Pecan said:

Lots of criticism out there about TLOU2. I just finished the game this morning at about 7 am and I'm still organizing my thoughts. But one spoiler-free comment I can make is that the enemy AI is freaking amazing. Other studios should take a gander at what Naughty Dog did here. In particular, I hope fellow Sony studios Guerrilla Games and Sony Bend take note for their next installments of Horizon and Days Gone, respectively. Those were both incredible games in their own right, but the human on human combat were weak aspects in both. 

My favorite aspect is that all the humans have names.  When you kill someone, if the body is found they are always referenced by name.  It's a nice design touch that never lets you forget that these are supposed to be real people you're killing.  

I'm not far enough in the game to comment on the narrative just yet.  No idea how y'all bear a 25+ hour game that is this dark and depressing in two days, but I think maybe binging it contributes to the negative opinion of it.  I'm going an hour or two at a time and am so far really enjoying it.  Whenever I start to get burnt out, I take a break. 

[red snow]

3 hours ago, briantw said:

My favorite aspect is that all the humans have names.  When you kill someone, if the body is found they are always referenced by name.  It's a nice design touch that never lets you forget that these are supposed to be real people you're killing.  

I'm not far enough in the game to comment on the narrative just yet.  No idea how y'all bear a 25+ hour game that is this dark and depressing in two days, but I think maybe binging it contributes to the negative opinion of it.  I'm going an hour or two at a time and am so far really enjoying it.  Whenever I start to get burnt out, I take a break. 

I'm still very early in the game and haven't encountered playable human antagonists yet but I like the fact they are usually far more dangerous.

regarding the negative reviews, I'll mention a spoiler from the opening hour/prologue of the game

I'm pissed/hurt by what they did to Joel. It doesn't make it a bad game or story for that matter. It certainly means that all the reviews about the vicious revenge theme is justified - I too want to make the bastards pay and I'm not interested in their reasons/context (torturing and killing a man who has just saved your life is low). I also think a lot of people are forgetting the quite important "4 years later". Joel had 4 good years with Ellie and his brother and were most likely the best 4 years he'd had since the spore outbreak. Plus, I'd be amazed if we don't get a Joel DLC covering an adventure he had during those 4 years.

I'm not reading any negative reviews as I suspect they are most likely to contain story spoilers. 

So far I'm having a blast and the only criticism I have is the aforementioned auto-save traps and the inconsistent physics behind objects blocking your path. That said, if the downtown segment is anything to go by the levels are quite expansive and easy to spend a few hours exploring - nowhere near as claustrophic/narrow as RES2/3 or Final  Fantasy VII remake (the latter being the most guilty of appearing large/free roaming but actually being very limited).

[Mark Antony]

Beat TLOU2 

overall I’d give it a 5 or 6 out of 10 in comparison to the first game. Abby just didn’t work for me. They used all their emotionally manipulative tricks to get me to sympathize with her but it never worked. Never bought into her character and hated playing as her for like 10 hours. Making me actually beat up Ellie controlling her was fucking miserable. Ah well I’m sure the game landed for a lot of people but it was missing mostly everything that made me fall in love with the first one

I think maybe you have to buy into Joel being completely in the wrong at the end of TLOU1 for this to work and I just was never gonna think that. Saving a little girl (the only known immune person in the world, you would think that would make her to valuable to just kill on the unrealistic slim chance you could make a cure) was the lesser of two evils in that situation imo.  As Joel said at the end I’d do it again every time 

 

[The Anti-Targ]

10 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

People lie. Especially when selling a product.

When selling a product they know is shite and is bound to disappoint.

However back to video games, I am quite enjoying seeing the desperate attempts to review bomb The Last of Us 2 on Metacritic over 64,000 user reviews the vast majority of which, there is little doubt is attempts to get the user score as close to zero as possible, but no doubt also a lot of high scores to try to negate the low ones. Meanwhile most gamers seem not to care about all that noise and the game broke sales records in the UK on its opening week. Entertaining stuff.

[Werthead]

12 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Maybe Jackson felt he needed to try to make a silk purse out of the sows ear that WB was demanding he use, because if he didn't do it WB would have taken their toys home and made the movie somewhere else, by someone else. At the end of the day I am not convinced Jackson's sacrifice of his artistic integrity was worth it. So he made bad compromises so that he could maintain control over the final product, perhaps partly because he felt some noble obligation to the material, but I think he was also driven by his own ego thinking that only he can do The Hobbit the right way (which he failed to do). He forced the govt to bend over to WB and bust the actor unions (which as a right wing govt it was more than happy to do) and to hand over an even bigger pile of govt cash to WB than the already generous film production inducements that were put on place to get LOTR filmed here. Jackson should have told WB to eff off and if they want to adapt the Hobbit without him in another country they should more power to them.

I was not aware that WB was putting the acid on jackson to make a trilogy. At the time all the PR made it seem like Jackson's own bright idea to make 3 films. So, assuming what you say is true, WB forced Jackson to look like a total chump having to try to justify turning a 300 page children's book in a 9 hour movie trilogy and making it seem like it was his idea. My memory may be faulty, but I seem to remember Jackson explicitly saying in an interview he went to WB to try to convince them that the project needed to be a 3 movie product not a 2 movie product. If it was WB demanding it and my memory is not faulty Jackson straight up lied to the media and the public.

We know the blackmail element was in play - that WB threatened to pull the movie from New Zealand and shoot it in Eastern Europe and completely freeze out the New Zealand film industry unless Jackson agreed to direct - and we know that WB later used the exact same line to get the New Zealand government to effectively shut down the film industry's union-won protections, roll back the power of unions and allow them to pay people a lot less money. At one point WB allegedly even threatened to turn the project over to Zack Snyder (which was an empty threat, as he was already all-in on the DCverse), which seemed to be the final insult that kept PJ on board. So all of that was going on.

We also know that WB and about-to-go-bankrupt MGM originally wanted three three-hour movies but Jackson and Del Toro decided that was utterly stupid, so they came up with an alternative plan which was to make two films out of The Hobbit and a third movie which would be a "bridging film" to Lord of the Rings and focus on the adventures of Young Aragorn meeting Legolas and having crazy adventures. They didn't particularly want to make that film, but used it as a way of keeping the studios happy whilst protecting The Hobbit. There are several, somewhat divergent narratives on what happened next, with one suggestion being Del Toro's re-envisioning of the world of The Hobbit had gone too far and ended up being incompatible with Jackson's vision (to the point of contradicting LotrR, or the 2/3 film argument continuing to rage in the background. We know that Del Toro quit, by his claim that the project was proceeding too slowly (which is unlikely, given the project suddenly went into overdrive the second he left) but there have been alternate claims that the studios had already committed to three films based on The Hobbit, which he flat-out refused to consider and walked when they insisted on it (the fact Jackson didn't confirm three movies until shooting was well underway is either him protecting the studio at gunpoint or him believing he could restrain them until two films until it was too late).

Jackson wanted to find another director because he was pre-committed to his Tintin collaborative trilogy with Spielberg, but WB and MGM effectively blackmailed him into making the film and they refused to give him the pre-production time he needed, so whilst LotR had more than two years of pre-production before shooting started, the Hobbit trilogy had a couple of months and given that they wanted to chuck out all of Del Toro's design work, that left everyone scrambling to get things ready (another reason the miniatures were cut, they didn't have time to physically build them, and most location filming was cut because they didn't have scouting time). And that's how the clusterfuck unfolded.

Like I said, Jackson's not blameless and should have considered calling their bluff, but with thousands of jobs on the line he felt that would be reckless. I also suspect he wanted to work from within to try to impact the end result positively, which didn't work. The situation also played to his capacity for self-indulgence, hence scenes that went on too long, the weak love story element and overlong action sequences. But the studios (all five of them, compared to the one involved in LotR) also played a horrendous role in events.

Lindsay Ellis's documentary trilogy on the matter is well worth watching.

[Mexal]

4 hours ago, Mark Antony said:

Beat TLOU2 

  Reveal hidden contents

overall I’d give it a 5 or 6 out of 10 in comparison to the first game. Abby just didn’t work for me. They used all their emotionally manipulative tricks to get me to sympathize with her but it never worked. Never bought into her character and hated playing as her for like 10 hours. Making me actually beat up Ellie controlling her was fucking miserable. Ah well I’m sure the game landed for a lot of people but it was missing mostly everything that made me fall in love with the first one

I think maybe you have to buy into Joel being completely in the wrong at the end of TLOU1 for this to work and I just was never gonna think that. Saving a little girl (the only known immune person in the world, you would think that would make her to valuable to just kill on the unrealistic slim chance you could make a cure) was the lesser of two evils in that situation imo.  As Joel said at the end I’d do it again every time 

 

Non spoiler thoughts?

 

12 hours ago, briantw said:

My favorite aspect is that all the humans have names.  When you kill someone, if the body is found they are always referenced by name.  It's a nice design touch that never lets you forget that these are supposed to be real people you're killing.  

I'm not far enough in the game to comment on the narrative just yet.  No idea how y'all bear a 25+ hour game that is this dark and depressing in two days, but I think maybe binging it contributes to the negative opinion of it.  I'm going an hour or two at a time and am so far really enjoying it.  Whenever I start to get burnt out, I take a break. 

I'm the same way. I'm doing an hour or two here and there and will take my time through the game and haven't had any narrative issues yet but I know they're coming, especially if they're making idiotic, short term decisions that leads into issues. I hate people making stupid decisions, it's why a movie like Uncut Gems pisses me off. We shall see, I'm not far enough in the game yet.

[Mark Antony]

My non spoiler thoughts are that for the most part a certain character didn’t work for me at all and it greatly impacted my enjoyment of the game. The visuals, sound, gameplay all top notch but the story fell flat for me.  

[Caligula_K3]

16 hours ago, Werthead said:

The Outer Worlds is excellent. I'm quite annoyed that there seems to be a small number of angry gamers who decided it was "too short" and have since gone around screaming blue murder about it continuously. It's a 30 hour game, maybe closer to 50 if you scour every map for secrets and all of the loot, which is perfectly fine. But there seem to be a few people who are angry it's not the length of a Fallout game (whilst ignoring the fact it had maybe a fifth or the sixth of the budget of Fallout 4, and certainly punched way above its weight in that category of at least looking a lot better than FO4 and having a vastly more reactive storyline and much better characters).

Yeah, the state of popular game criticism is really out of wack these days (and that's not even getting into the alt-right stuff that's cropped up around games like The Last of Us 2 or any game that dares to have a character who isn't a gruff, strong, straight, white man). On the one hand, gamers seem to be constantly crying out for games that are 20-50 hours long, that are less procedurally generated, and that focus on characters and writing over open-world exploration; the open world fatigue problem. But as soon as a game like that is released that's not an indie darling... everyone whines about how they didn't get their money's worth. On the one hand people seem to want more personalized, shorter and sweeter video game experiences, like Mass Effect 2; on the other, if a video game doesn't stay entertaining forever, it's a failure.

As an example of this, there's a post on the Nintendo Switch subreddit from this morning about how the new Animal Crossing game drastically needs more content... because after spending 400 hours in the game (in three months), the poster found it was starting to get boring. No shit. It's like all the people who complain that Skyrim starts feeling formulaic after it's 200th hour. If you spend 200 hours or even 50 hours in a game before it starts feeling formulaic... It's doing something right.

[The Anti-Targ]

 

6 hours ago, Mexal said:

Non spoiler thoughts?

 

I'm the same way. I'm doing an hour or two here and there and will take my time through the game and haven't had any narrative issues yet but I know they're coming, especially if they're making idiotic, short term decisions that leads into issues. I hate people making stupid decisions, it's why a movie like Uncut Gems pisses me off. We shall see, I'm not far enough in the game yet.

People making stupid decisions in movies / TV / games only annoys me if the sensible decision is abundantly clear, or there is no clear underlying character flaw that means making the stupid decision is consistent with the character. It's not like we don't make stupid decisions IRL

[briantw]

41 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

People making stupid decisions in movies / TV / games only annoys me if the sensible decision is abundantly clear, or there is no clear underlying character flaw that means making the stupid decision is consistent with the character. It's not like we don't make stupid decisions IRL

I'd argue that in real life humans tend to make far dumber decisions pretty constantly than they do in TV shows.

We can't even convince a chunk of our population in the US to wear masks during a global pandemic.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, briantw said:

I'd argue that in real life humans tend to make far dumber decisions pretty constantly than they do in TV shows.

We can't even convince a chunk of our population in the US to wear masks during a global pandemic.

I'm trying to find a way to argue the point, but I can't come up with anything.

[briantw]

Regarding what happens at the end of the prologue of The Last of Us II shortly before you leave Jackson...

Spoiler

I get that people are upset about Joel dying, but isn't this sort of a "reap what you sow" situation?  After all, Joel basically doomed humanity by not only not allowing a cure to be developed, but also killing all the doctors that could have developed it in the event that they found another immune person.  If anyone deserved to be killed, he's probably at the top of the list.  

As much as I loved the ending of the first game, Joel is not the good guy.  He made a selfish, emotional decision and everyone else except him had to pay the price for it.  His own bill finally came due four years later.

 

[Jace, Extat]

I finished The Last of Us 2 when I got off work this morning. Wanted to sleep and rant at a friend before I gave my thoughts. Just in case anything needed to seattle.

I give it a D-. When I first thought of writing this post before I slept, I was thinking D+ but sobriety has a way of sharpening my critiques, and it's clear to me now that the snap-grade was exceedingly generous, and not altogether unconnected to my having given the game a more generous grade while I was still in-progress. A notation clouded by optimism and idiocy.

The gameplay is fine. Great at times. Visuals are really amazing. And the overall concept of the story is one that I find quite compelling. It's the execution that collapses face-first through the floor. Truly abysmal. The best thing that can be said for the plot of this game is that it has so many ingredients for a good story already present and spinning around that I actively resented it for force-feeding me the final product.

Five or six times, I SHIT YOU NOT, FIVE OR SIX TIMES!!! I said to myself "that was just not good at all... c'mon, guys. There's still a lot of stuff I'm interested in, though, I'm sure it'll start to come together in the next scene." I felt like a chump by the time I realized I was in the end game. Seriously disappointing. If Cyberpunk is like this I'll destroy the moon.

 

Spoilery review:

Spoiler

What a mess! The game starts off solidly, simply. Splitting time between Abby and Ellie was not a bad decision, Halo 2 introduced an 'enemy' protagonist to share screen time to great aplomb. In fact, I found the decision encouraging. Especially when Abby beat Joel to death with a club. If you didn't know Joel was gonna bite it in this game, you either never devoted a solitary thought to what might happen after the first one or you're a fucking lack wit. People citing this event as "too graphic" are whiny bitches who recognize that they're unfulfilled by a story but, because they can't articulate problems regarding plot and pacing, latch onto a single identifiable upsetting element. Even if the element in question was intended to be upsetting.

I have to address this further, regarding tone. Because tone is a problem in this installment. Joel getting beat to death is petty brutal. If you were made uncomfortable by the scene, that's probably to your credit. Seeing a man get his head staved in with a five-iron shouldn't leave you in a chipper mood. That being said, I thought the scene was actually very good at taking us right up to that line separating graphic material from torture porn. So here comes the problem...

You open the game with a Joel's brutal (not unjustified) murder by a newly introduced player character. We then re-assume Ellie's POV to see her absolutely bent on revenge, following this dark path. However she has a bizarre series of supporting characters orbiting around her whose purposes are to... I actually don't know. I'm not really sure what the purpose of Ellie's friends were, besides the one who was introduced in the beginning specifically so that he could show up- out of motherfucking nowhere- and be murdered to give the proceedings a sense of gravity. Tommy flip-flops between conservatism and revenge then ends up practically frothing at the goddamn mouth by the end without me learning a single thing about the man that I didn't know from game one. Dina is an anchor around Ellie's neck, holding her back from revenge and also pushing her away from other humans in Jackson who could help her find a sense of purpose to replace the void left by Joel's excising from her life. None of these characters contribute to either Ellie's growth from despair or her descent into it. They could have not been present and while her actions may have been altered, her motivations would not have been. This is not a sign of good characters, and yes we're still on tone. Because these characters contribute nothing to Ellie's emotional state, they mostly just act like Walking Dead characters. Kinda depressed, but sarcastically funny and full of ironic observations about the old world. THIS DOESN'T WORK in game 2. I'm familiar with this setting now, you need to take a step beyond leftover comics and museums/aquariums. Maybe that football stadium at the heart of a massive civilization in the ruins of Seattle could have been explored further. I'm much more interested in the basis for Isaac's authority than seeing Ellie play Carl with some dinosaurs.

Ellie is full of rage and feelings of impotence. Her companions should react to that more than not at all. And saying "how far are we willing to go" once apiece in separate cutscenes are not what I'm looking for. Dina, particularly, should always be dancing around this issue. Why? Because she's a passive airhead who contributes nothing to the story besides having a plot device squirted up her pussy. Any time Ellie's mood turns dark Dina softly acknowledges her pain and consents to the continuation of the story despite clearly not being a "I'm on a rampage, Lana!" kinda gal. This creates moments where our two main characters for the first part of the game are utterly detached from the motivations for their fucking mission because Ellie only wants to murder people and Dina isn't violent by nature or driven by revenge. She's just following along behind Ellie. I thought Dina was going to ditch Ellie, up till the "I'm pregnant" reveal, which made me want to vomit. Didn't take a fucking second for me to know how that whole "Martha!?! WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT NAME!?!" shtick was gonna go down.

So we spend the first half or so of the game with Ellie's revenge quest before switching over to Abby again. This is one of those five or six moments I mentioned earlier, where I could not fathom a way to fuck up the story laid out by Ellie's segment. Lack of imagination on my part. Abby seems like a pretty serious person. Not a lot of nonsense involved with her character. After half a game of hunting her down and killing her friends one by one (or close enough) we get to play as Abby, who is taking part in a massive war. Not only that, but she's on what seems like a pretty short list of Captains in -let me say again- a CIVILIZATION that doesn't seem made up of thugs and murderers but rather a secure civilian population and a dedicated soldiery. Abby throws all of that away to go see her former boyfriend, abandoning an in-progress operation to fight her way across town to a location that a pregnant woman (who I'm pretty sure was fucking shot the cutscene previous) just walked to off screen alone. Remember that Abby was very nearly murdered on this trip. Which brings us to the death of the game, certainly the franchise for me. Those kids. Just awful.

Abby, a no-nonsense chick who committed a calculated act of murder five minutes after I met her and seems distant from even her closest friends, adopts two enemy combatants. I get that they saved her, but this is just terrible writing. They shouldn't have cut her down, she should not have protected them. It makes zero sense for Abby, who has been a soldier for the WLF's for YEARS to shift her loyalties on a dime like this. The game has not presented any character traits that would suggest faithlessness or ruinous empathy from Abby, she has never expressed regret at having to kill enemies, and quite frankly the kids are annoying as shit. Their antics ruin any potential for a halfway decent second half of the game. Repeatedly.

I could say so much about the idiocy of Abby going into that hospital basement for a Scar that I am struggling to put letters together. Everything about the event was shocking in its badness. From Mel (quite pregnant) fast traveling to the aquarium and being happy to help enemies just for Abby, who she admits to hating a single scene later, to the insistence that Abby risk her life just to avoid the possibility of an infection after amputation. Seriously??? She didn't go down the street to Walgreens, she went across the fucking city and into an unfathomable hellhole that MULTIPLE CHARACTERS said was a deathtrap just to get some prepackaged equipment for a chop-and-drop.

Step 1) Boil the saw.

Step 2) Wash the incision site.

Step 3) Hope for the best.

I just saved 25% of the game's runtime to reallocate towards something interesting.

Abby kept muttering to herself "this is crazy" or "why am I doing this?" in that basement. I AGREE!!! FUCKING LEAVE! I've never spoken to myself as much during a videogame as that basement. The events leading up to it were irritating because I could feel precious game hours slipping away, but the basement was a bridge too fucking far. I wasn't having fun fighting that amorphous blob boss, I was thinking about how it could have impacted a more relevant story.

And then she dies! Setting aside being fine after having your arm removed, she survives exactly long enough to kill the only interesting actor left in Abby's life before I learn a single goddamn thing about him. WHAT!?! WHY!?! WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA!?!!!???!!!!??? You can't start a narrow personally-driven revenge quest story that intersects with a war, pivot to the POV of someone WHO SHOULD FIGHT THE WAR then remove both warring parties from the narrative without any impact on the plot. This isn't how stories work! Things are supposed to matter, if not in context to me and my life at least they should be relevant to the people I care about in the story. This is called emotional investment. Herodotus didn't just tell a story about an army led by a dude who fought another army and then some people had their own conflict quite separately.

I could go on, there's a lot more I could go on about. The end stage is fun, and the writing is almost better but that may just be because they didn't have time to really fuck it up. The ending wasn't bad. I know people are probably saying that, and I have to disagree. I think they found the right ending more or less. It's how they got there that leaves it tasting of ash. Ellie is spared by Abby twice before returning the favor kind of outta nowhere after going on another revenge quest... I can't even. I thought, when it was clear that the Rattlers were slavers and whatnot, I thought that Abby and/or Lev would be in a cell. Maybe with some other slaves. And having obviously been mistreated and deprived, Ellie would take pity on her enemy and come to some realization that she didn't want to follow through on the killing. Either after a fight (like what happened essentially) or maybe through being forced to work together. I didn't think they would both have survived soft-core crucifixion for several days, Ellie would release and escort them away, and then they'd just fight until Ellie decided she didn't want to no more. That... was not good.

To wrap up, I'll say again that I like the ideas they had for a story rather a lot. But this is irredeemable. It needed massive rewrites, to combine Dina and Discount Glenn into a new character named Dina, and to avoid trying to make Abby a saint. That's the only explanation for her actions. She had to look like a good guy so you'd forgive her for Joel and want Ellie to spare her. So either have her straight up heading Unicef or let her be a soldier with hidden depths that emerge over the course of your time with her. You need to pick one. She can't be the hardest core WLF Scar Killer Badass and also have a heart bigger than Andre the Giant. Not without much better writers behind the keyboards.

D-

Game play is engaging and fun. Story is an albatross.

 

 

 

[The Drunkard]

14 hours ago, Mark Antony said:

My non spoiler thoughts are that for the most part a certain character didn’t work for me at all and it greatly impacted my enjoyment of the game. The visuals, sound, gameplay all top notch but the story fell flat for me.  

All spoilers:

I am still a mix of surprised and disappointed that they spent so much time on her. Apparently there was a heap of other content, including a Seattle Day 4 & 5 and some more post-farmhouse sections, that they either cut or didn't complete in order to tell Abby's story. Which turned out to be a 10-15 hour addition to the game showing the player that Abby is not all bad, that she's not too dissimilar from Ellie, and that revenge is unsatisfying and can ruin your life even if you succeed. Which is the exact same moral as in every other revenge story I've ever consumed.

10 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I finished The Last of Us 2 when I got off work this morning. Wanted to sleep and rant at a friend before I gave my thoughts. Just in case anything needed to seattle.

I give it a D-. When I first thought of writing this post before I slept, I was thinking D+ but sobriety has a way of sharpening my critiques, and it's clear to me now that the snap-grade was exceedingly generous, and not altogether unconnected to my having given the game a more generous grade while I was still in-progress. A notation clouded by optimism and idiocy.

The gameplay is fine. Great at times. Visuals are really amazing. And the overall concept of the story is one that I find quite compelling. It's the execution that collapses face-first through the floor. Truly abysmal. The best thing that can be said for the plot of this game is that it has so many ingredients for a good story already present and spinning around that I actively resented it for force-feeding me the final product.

Five or six times, I SHIT YOU NOT, FIVE OR SIX TIMES!!! I said to myself "that was just not good at all... c'mon, guys. There's still a lot of stuff I'm interested in, though, I'm sure it'll start to come together in the next scene." I felt like a chump by the time I realized I was in the end game. Seriously disappointing. If Cyberpunk is like this I'll destroy the moon.

 

Spoilery review:

  Hide contents

What a mess! The game starts off solidly, simply. Splitting time between Abby and Ellie was not a bad decision, Halo 2 introduced an 'enemy' protagonist to share screen time to great aplomb. In fact, I found the decision encouraging. Especially when Abby beat Joel to death with a club. If you didn't know Joel was gonna bite it in this game, you either never devoted a solitary thought to what might happen after the first one or you're a fucking lack wit. People citing this event as "too graphic" are whiny bitches who recognize that they're unfulfilled by a story but, because they can't articulate problems regarding plot and pacing, latch onto a single identifiable upsetting element. Even if the element in question was intended to be upsetting.

I have to address this further, regarding tone. Because tone is a problem in this installment. Joel getting beat to death is petty brutal. If you were made uncomfortable by the scene, that's probably to your credit. Seeing a man get his head staved in with a five-iron shouldn't leave you in a chipper mood. That being said, I thought the scene was actually very good at taking us right up to that line separating graphic material from torture porn. So here comes the problem...

You open the game with a Joel's brutal (not unjustified) murder by a newly introduced player character. We then re-assume Ellie's POV to see her absolutely bent on revenge, following this dark path. However she has a bizarre series of supporting characters orbiting around her whose purposes are to... I actually don't know. I'm not really sure what the purpose of Ellie's friends were, besides the one who was introduced in the beginning specifically so that he could show up- out of motherfucking nowhere- and be murdered to give the proceedings a sense of gravity. Tommy flip-flops between conservatism and revenge then ends up practically frothing at the goddamn mouth by the end without me learning a single thing about the man that I didn't know from game one. Dina is an anchor around Ellie's neck, holding her back from revenge and also pushing her away from other humans in Jackson who could help her find a sense of purpose to replace the void left by Joel's excising from her life. None of these characters contribute to either Ellie's growth from despair or her descent into it. They could have not been present and while her actions may have been altered, her motivations would not have been. This is not a sign of good characters, and yes we're still on tone. Because these characters contribute nothing to Ellie's emotional state, they mostly just act like Walking Dead characters. Kinda depressed, but sarcastically funny and full of ironic observations about the old world. THIS DOESN'T WORK in game 2. I'm familiar with this setting now, you need to take a step beyond leftover comics and museums/aquariums. Maybe that football stadium at the heart of a massive civilization in the ruins of Seattle could have been explored further. I'm much more interested in the basis for Isaac's authority than seeing Ellie play Carl with some dinosaurs.

Ellie is full of rage and feelings of impotence. Her companions should react to that more than not at all. And saying "how far are we willing to go" once apiece in separate cutscenes are not what I'm looking for. Dina, particularly, should always be dancing around this issue. Why? Because she's a passive airhead who contributes nothing to the story besides having a plot device squirted up her pussy. Any time Ellie's mood turns dark Dina softly acknowledges her pain and consents to the continuation of the story despite clearly not being a "I'm on a rampage, Lana!" kinda gal. This creates moments where our two main characters for the first part of the game are utterly detached from the motivations for their fucking mission because Ellie only wants to murder people and Dina isn't violent by nature or driven by revenge. She's just following along behind Ellie. I thought Dina was going to ditch Ellie, up till the "I'm pregnant" reveal, which made me want to vomit. Didn't take a fucking second for me to know how that whole "Martha!?! WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT NAME!?!" shtick was gonna go down.

So we spend the first half or so of the game with Ellie's revenge quest before switching over to Abby again. This is one of those five or six moments I mentioned earlier, where I could not fathom a way to fuck up the story laid out by Ellie's segment. Lack of imagination on my part. Abby seems like a pretty serious person. Not a lot of nonsense involved with her character. After half a game of hunting her down and killing her friends one by one (or close enough) we get to play as Abby, who is taking part in a massive war. Not only that, but she's on what seems like a pretty short list of Captains in -let me say again- a CIVILIZATION that doesn't seem made up of thugs and murderers but rather a secure civilian population and a dedicated soldiery. Abby throws all of that away to go see her former boyfriend, abandoning an in-progress operation to fight her way across town to a location that a pregnant woman (who I'm pretty sure was fucking shot the cutscene previous) just walked to off screen alone. Remember that Abby was very nearly murdered on this trip. Which brings us to the death of the game, certainly the franchise for me. Those kids. Just awful.

Abby, a no-nonsense chick who committed a calculated act of murder five minutes after I met her and seems distant from even her closest friends, adopts two enemy combatants. I get that they saved her, but this is just terrible writing. They shouldn't have cut her down, she should not have protected them. It makes zero sense for Abby, who has been a soldier for the WLF's for YEARS to shift her loyalties on a dime like this. The game has not presented any character traits that would suggest faithlessness or ruinous empathy from Abby, she has never expressed regret at having to kill enemies, and quite frankly the kids are annoying as shit. Their antics ruin any potential for a halfway decent second half of the game. Repeatedly.

I could say so much about the idiocy of Abby going into that hospital basement for a Scar that I am struggling to put letters together. Everything about the event was shocking in its badness. From Mel (quite pregnant) fast traveling to the aquarium and being happy to help enemies just for Abby, who she admits to hating a single scene later, to the insistence that Abby risk her life just to avoid the possibility of an infection after amputation. Seriously??? She didn't go down the street to Walgreens, she went across the fucking city and into an unfathomable hellhole that MULTIPLE CHARACTERS said was a deathtrap just to get some prepackaged equipment for a chop-and-drop.

Step 1) Boil the saw.

Step 2) Wash the incision site.

Step 3) Hope for the best.

I just saved 25% of the game's runtime to reallocate towards something interesting.

Abby kept muttering to herself "this is crazy" or "why am I doing this?" in that basement. I AGREE!!! FUCKING LEAVE! I've never spoken to myself as much during a videogame as that basement. The events leading up to it were irritating because I could feel precious game hours slipping away, but the basement was a bridge too fucking far. I wasn't having fun fighting that amorphous blob boss, I was thinking about how it could have impacted a more relevant story.

And then she dies! Setting aside being fine after having your arm removed, she survives exactly long enough to kill the only interesting actor left in Abby's life before I learn a single goddamn thing about him. WHAT!?! WHY!?! WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA!?!!!???!!!!??? You can't start a narrow personally-driven revenge quest story that intersects with a war, pivot to the POV of someone WHO SHOULD FIGHT THE WAR then remove both warring parties from the narrative without any impact on the plot. This isn't how stories work! Things are supposed to matter, if not in context to me and my life at least they should be relevant to the people I care about in the story. This is called emotional investment. Herodotus didn't just tell a story about an army led by a dude who fought another army and then some people had their own conflict quite separately.

I could go on, there's a lot more I could go on about. The end stage is fun, and the writing is almost better but that may just be because they didn't have time to really fuck it up. The ending wasn't bad. I know people are probably saying that, and I have to disagree. I think they found the right ending more or less. It's how they got there that leaves it tasting of ash. Ellie is spared by Abby twice before returning the favor kind of outta nowhere after going on another revenge quest... I can't even. I thought, when it was clear that the Rattlers were slavers and whatnot, I thought that Abby and/or Lev would be in a cell. Maybe with some other slaves. And having obviously been mistreated and deprived, Ellie would take pity on her enemy and come to some realization that she didn't want to follow through on the killing. Either after a fight (like what happened essentially) or maybe through being forced to work together. I didn't think they would both have survived soft-core crucifixion for several days, Ellie would release and escort them away, and then they'd just fight until Ellie decided she didn't want to no more. That... was not good.

To wrap up, I'll say again that I like the ideas they had for a story rather a lot. But this is irredeemable. It needed massive rewrites, to combine Dina and Discount Glenn into a new character named Dina, and to avoid trying to make Abby a saint. That's the only explanation for her actions. She had to look like a good guy so you'd forgive her for Joel and want Ellie to spare her. So either have her straight up heading Unicef or let her be a soldier with hidden depths that emerge over the course of your time with her. You need to pick one. She can't be the hardest core WLF Scar Killer Badass and also have a heart bigger than Andre the Giant. Not without much better writers behind the keyboards.

D-

Game play is engaging and fun. Story is an albatross.

 

 

 

All spoilers:

The ending actually soured me a lot on the game, just because of how generic it was for a revenge story. In contrast I thought TLOU had an interesting twist in that the jaded old man regaining his humanity story resulted in said regained humanity making him commit the most selfish (and debatably evil) act of his entire life, which was new to me.

[red snow]

The F-ING autosave/point of no return thing is really pissing me off in TLOU-II. Lost 3 hours of game play because I opened a door and it went to a cutscene. Couldn't get back into the hotel after that. I guess someone must have removed the dumpster that allowed me to get into the hotel in the first place while I was briefly in there. It's such bullshit that it does this and it takes me out of the game if i have to save a back-up every time i walk through a damn door.

[Gorn]

I was sad and disappointed to hear the news about Chris Avellone. This will retroactively mess up my enjoyment of most of my favorite RPGs. At the very least, it will make me reexamine any male-female relationships and interactions in those games.

I'm already remembering some problematic ones, such as the super-misogynist character of Durance in Pillars of Eternity. Now I'm wondering how much of himself did Avellone put into writing him.

[sifth]

Yea, the first TLoU game has the better ending, IMO.

 

Maybe it's mostly because I find myself agreeing with Joel's actions in that game, where part II pretty much goes out of it's way to demonize him for it. While the first games ending is certainly not a happy one, I always viewed it as a very interesting one. With the second one however, I don't know it just made me feel depressed and miserable; almost like life sucks and nothing matters, was the moral of the game. In some ways the game reminds me of MGS:V, where these so called professional review sites gave the game amazing reviews, but the response from the fans was very mixed. Feels kind of strange, but I suppose these things do happen.

[Werthead]

43 minutes ago, Gorn said:

I was sad and disappointed to hear the news about Chris Avellone. This will retroactively mess up my enjoyment of most of my favorite RPGs. At the very least, it will make me reexamine any male-female relationships and interactions in those games.

I'm already remembering some problematic ones, such as the super-misogynist character of Durance in Pillars of Eternity. Now I'm wondering how much of himself did Avellone put into writing him.

Yeah, this was upsetting because he did write and co-write several of my favourite games of all time. Although his work for the last ten years seemed to be constantly getting cut or being reduced to very small contributions. He hasn't actually led a project since the New Vegas DLC, which was ten years ago, and not a full game since Alpha Protocol in 2009.

Of course, it was nowhere near as upsetting as Avellone's behaviour was to the people he harassed and demeaned. Fuck that.

[briantw]

15 minutes ago, sifth said:

Yea,the first TLoU game has the better ending, IMO.

  Reveal hidden contents

Maybe it's mostly because I find myself agreeing with Joel's actions in that game, where part II pretty much goes out of it's way to demonize him for it. While the first games ending is certainly not a happy one, I always viewed it as a very interesting one. With the second one however, I don't know it just made me feel depressed and miserable; almost like life sucks and nothing matters, was the moral of the game. In some ways the game reminds me of MGS:V, where these so called professional review sites gave the game amazing reviews, but the response from the fans was very mixed. Feels kind of strange, but I suppose these things do happen.

Not clicking on your hidden stuff, as I am a long way from finishing the second game, but the first game had one of the best game endings ever, so I would have been surprised had the sequel surpassed it in that aspect.

I'll have to hold off on additional comments about the second game until I get further.

[Rhom]

Just watched the first Wartable for Marvel's Avengers from SquareEnix.  (All this time... and I still just want to call it Square! )

Game looked really good and they seem to have a good mix of single and co-op play.