I played mgs5 shooting every guy I didn’t fulton in the head with the silenced mrs-4 so I could get a sick devil horn. I should have killed quiet instead of dropping a box on her head, I don’t know why I deviated from the plan.
I also like to play deus ex the way paul wants until you join the NSF, then the silenced pistol and knife comes out for the globalist thugs.
in deus ex, that’s also exactly the point when the game stops tracking whether you killed anyone, almost like the designers intended for you to play this way
Also roughly the point where you can start upgrading your augs and actually fight back effectively whereas JC is too fragile even on lower difficulties to act like a one-man army in the early game man deus ex is so good
i really like how DX1 suggests morality w/ out explicitly systemizing it (narrativizes it instead) eg. Paul explicitly tells you not to kill guys (for his own reasons! not just because its the right thing) but also when you eavesdrop on NSF guys they seem like a mix of true believer freedom fighters & average schmucks… because they are. even the MS13 grunts who i have no qualms killing sound like theyre just punching the clock. (i also dont kill the dockworkers in the ship mission theyre innocent)
Thief 1-2-3 do the same thing. you dont wanna hurt ol Benny!!
(i do always end up being treated like a cold blooded killer by Anna because i sneak in through the back of castle clinton, and its flagged so she runs in slaughters everyone and upon observing any of the dead bodies she just created is like “hey nice work rookie”. im also nice to her for her free EMP grenades)
Play it on the hardest difficulty! Those fights will last (of us) a lot longer than 5 minutes let me tell you. LOU on grounded difficulty is like Halo on legendary or Quake on nightmare or whatever, it’s just a better game
For what it’s worth, The Last of Us Part 2 is a pretty goddamn good game, as playing goes. Makes the first one feel like a proof of concept or something. There’s a whole stealth segment in a neighborhood, with a bunch of open overgrown houses, that had some of the best stealth moments I’ve had in a game, period.
It’s just the story that constantly makes you feel miserable.
playing last of us on grounded confirmed i really just can ignore the canon in videogames and just go for stuff when it’s actually speaking to whatever trash sensibilities i have
so like, maybe eventually tlou2… maybe? not for how it plays as that’s a moot point here, but if it’s as gory and horrible and GAY as it presents itself as then… you know… maybe?
I’ve always hated Swat 4 for this reason, even though it was ostensibly the only cqb game that was an upgrade on Raven Shield for many years. Don’t give me like 25 cool guns to use and then tell me I lose points if I do anything other than shoot guys with a CO2 pepperball launcher, fuck you
That doesn’t solve the problem of having to trudge through the story to get to the fights though!
I think the fighting section that I stopped at and replayed over and over was the first time the game introduced a dog. I think you’re in the back room of a store and then bad guys enter the store through the front entrance, and you’ve got like multiple ways out of that situation. A few different doors/windows to jump through with different guys on each path, so you can either start combat from different areas or just setup traps on different paths and watch chaos unfold.
I’d totally jump back in on Grounded if there was a way to just unlock and jump to all the combat sections right away though. Back in my day games had cheat codes to unlock all chapters!
I’ve still only played half of the game but this tracks with my experience with it. I feel like the mechanical advancements it makes are overshadowed by all the controversy, and maybe deservedly so. but it is so much more of a game than the original. the enemy AI is terrifyingly sophisticated, and the setpieces are more open-ended and sandboxy; they often feature both militant groups and infected in the same area having unscripted interactions which the first game never really even tried to do. resource management felt more meaningful and purposeful as well, like I felt like more moment-to-moment decisions really mattered in a way that wasn’t true in the first game. all of these things were exciting and cool but the story just dragged me to the point where I couldn’t stay motivated to progress.
I really just can’t accept that the first game needed a sequel, I didn’t want to know what happened after the ending, and I really hated being asked to care enough about joel to go on an extremely ill-advised revenge mission on his behalf, especially knowing what I did about him and ellie didn’t. I just never bought into ellie’s motivation, let alone her friend that tags along seemingly just for the lols. the tone feels almost resentful at times, as if the game itself can’t find its own justification for existing so it just reaches for the nastiest and most miserable plot beats to sustain itself like it’s punishing you for wanting it to exist at all. and it just keeps trudging on this way without ever addressing the growing number of elephants in the room. it’s excruciating! I don’t think I even got to the really controversial stuff and it was still enough to turn me off… I’ll probably finish it someday but I don’t have a lot of hope that it will redeem itself.
Yeah, this was like the showstopper for me going into TLoU2 and it never really challenged me to change that view. So after the first game purposely asked you to distance yourself from the characters, the story makes the assumption that you’re still personally invested in the characters from the outset and makes no attempt at re-investing you into Joel and Ellie, let alone anyone else in those opening scenes. So I literally did not feel any reason to care about anything going on in that game despite it trying to be at maximum drama from the outset.
it doesn’t exist anyway it was invented by an internet game of telephone
it’s amazing the shit people said happened in it before it came out that actually didn’t. idiot types were trying to convince everyone some really violent scene with the muscle lady was her being TRANS thats why shes STRONG and that she was beating a cis woman to death? or something, and it just ended up being some deranged psyop by channers that never went anywhere
yeah i rememeber when we fell for that!
the writers israeli politics really do a good job of murkying the waters enough to let that stuff fester I’ll say
I still choose to believe they were doing anal in that sex scene
I think at least one thing that made people the most big-time-mad was the inevitable end of the game conclusion that Abby best girl
I keep seeing people call this game Israeli propaganda and I have to admit I have no idea what they are talking about.
And yeah, pretty sure the bulk of controversy around the story is that most dudebros seem to think that killing the main character in a way that’s not a heroic self sacrifice is ‘poor writing’ and/or ‘a slap in the face of the fans’. Abby being designed specifically to be someone that sets off the rightwing woke alarms is just extra salt in their wounds.
I agree with Toups about the story though, I couldn’t get invested in Ellie’s revenge plot at all and the whole thing is like 50% longer than it should be
oh i’m just talking about the fact that the guy who wrote the game is literally a conservative israeli i doubt the last of us part 2 is some kind of zionist narrative because parker wouldn’t be in here saying it’s good if it was
yes gamergate types were mad at the game for their boy experiencing consequences and getting beat to death by a muscle woman. other types were mad at the game for a bunch of imaginary things that aren’t in the game. so it’s impossible to enjoy the game and not go insane reading about it online.
the washington liberation front is an idf analogue I guess. which is it’s a fascist militia that ends up destroying itself in a war against a religious group. so yeah, sure, it’s idf propaganda. fuck it!
The true Naughty Dog experience