undertale discovering the wild concept of “If you make actual characters people don’t want to hurt they will feel bad if they kill them” that seems to elude most serious and moral game developers, like even the random monsters have a ton of character. Why would I ever beat up a guy who just cries at me because he’s sad!!
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This is a convo everyone here has had a billion times but these cheaper games are so much more capable of getting that kind of experience right because the devs are more able to afford the necessary reactivity.
In Undertale it was way cheaper and therefore way less risky for the creator to give the crying ghosts thank-you lines after you spare them than it would have been for a AAA game to create a similar experience. If I could have spared these folks in TLOU2 it would have meant hours of slightly different content, fully unique VO, the need to match the length of various routes, etc. The more high fidelity things are, the less flexible they can be. I think the dream of AI chuds is to reverse this, but given what I have seen at big corporations I doubt that this will work the way they think it should in practice
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Undead franchise doesn’t want to die, news at eleven 
… wellll, did we really waste 100 posts and not have a properly contrarian opinion here?
j/k, the real answer is:
Just don’t play shlock like this, i guess. Not gonna lie and be all ‘I have the best tastes!’, rather the opposite — but i trust my compass for avoiding bullshit, and TloU did signal quite early that time was better spent elsewhere. Dunno what made me bounce off of it so hard … idk, maybe I don’t need a patronizing walking dead simulator forcing me to
s…l…o…w…l…y…e…x…p…e…r…i…e.nc…e…e…m…o…t…i…o…n…s
but srsly, i don’t get it — if i want ‘epic story!’, idk, I’d rather watch a movie or read a book. So the idea of rehashing part deux of a game that bored me to death already, well… if that’s what people… want…
(consider that half-hearted rant my seemingly irregular but contractually guaranteed annual rage post dissing a beloved franchise or well-received title because i have weird tastes )
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something similar ive been thinking about re: movies is the way the stylistic demands of like, commercial cinema industries often precludes more opaque forms of expression like expression by ellipsis, what is left out can speak louder for its absence, etc., like armored core vi never stages its dialogue with 3d model people, instead asking us to imagine the weary faces of the characters bathed in monitor glow, how this feels more like, somber than a lot of ps4 games
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when I was replaying arcanum a while back I was thinking about how you have the option to use the fallout 1 style world map to travel, which requires you to use your imagination to fill in the blanks about what the wider world could be like, or you can actually just trudge through the endless repetitive wilderness screens/random encounters to get to these places and have it all filled in for you to much less effect because it’s so much more boring than you could have ever imagined
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I think at a certain point a game is what it is and you either buy into it or not and putting the controller down to break it or make some point is like taking on a role in a play and then instead of reading your lines just staring at the wall for hours
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the tv show is better
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i think when a video game suddenly turns into a shitty play where im suddenly the lead actor it better be compelling me to do something besides put the controller down
If i chose to put the controller down and you didnt then we are officially talking past eachother friend
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Yeah but many many people have had the experience of being cast in a play and then realizing during rehearsal “oh man. This play sucks shit”
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I’ve been thinking Alan Wake 2 is just a better version of The Last of Us 2’s general template.
I feel pulled to do The Last of Us search for things around every environment a bit too much. I get this is a common aspect of a lot of survival horror, but it felt like the most AAA aspect of the whole experience for some reason. This led to other (mostly) superficial comparisons.
- You alternately play as two characters: The two characters have a bossfight against each other at one point. In TLOU2 this feels uncanny and contrived. In AW2 it makes sense in context why the player can control one but not the other
- Looting every drawer. Laps around every room.
- Both are character cutscene dense but I think FMV > CG. I think we’re gonna start seeing more of this in certain AAA/AA budgets since it’s surely cheaper and arguably more effective for direct character stuff.
- Both longer 3PS going into 20+ hours depending on how much you do in AW2. AW2 feels a good length as long as you don’t do too much sidestuff. TLOU2 feels like it will never end.
- Characters upgrade one of a small number of weapons at a desk.
- Zombies are there but not the main problem.
- Forests, lodges, and abandoned cities
AW2 handles the chronological disconnect between its characters in a more interesting way than TLOU2 does. Hatred/justifying [mass] murder as a theme feels stretched across 25 hours. Wake has a lot more for me to eat. TLOU2 feels like a really laboured Rashomon which contributes to its horrible length. AW2 gives the player a lot more agency and more interesting ways to think about the connections between the character’s chronology and actions. I felt TLOU2 was too long and blunt but there are decent bits. It’s just so gaudy and expensive that it collapses in on itself. It would probably be perfect if Neil Druckmann’s name was Neil Revenge.
Change Reality
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What’s wrong with trying to break the game? 
Might as well at least give it a shot if that’s how you feel inclined, something fun might happen
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well other people can do what they want but I like to respect the material even if the material doesn’t respect me. destiny 2’s a 21st century torture device made by broken minds who should all be hunted down and tried in a speedy show trial before being thrown in a hole forever, but I wouldn’t want to boot it up and then just stare at the floor ingame. there’s got to be a better way to disagree with the thing. that sort of thing wasn’t interesting to me back when tim rogers did it in bioshock. I do enough staring at walls for hours in life, I can just not start up a game if I want to do more of that. it’s just more interesting to me to engage with the thing they bothered to make and think about the things that result from that, or read things about games by people bothering to engage with them, whether they or I like the thing or not. unfortunately with tlou2 that was almost entirely outside of sb. you gotta open the doors of your heart to god’s love*
*letting yourself take po-faced cutscenes seriously
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The reason I chose to try putting the controller down this time when I do not normally is that the plot of the game is essentially about whether Ellie can put the controller down. Can she stop killing people? If the player is eager to stop killing people like 15 hours before Ellie is, then the game has failed. And in this case I think it was fun and appropriate of me to see what would happen if I tried to demonstrate that I had learned the lesson the game was so slowly and stupidly trying to teach me and Ellie
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I mean sure, I agree, but I don’t think that’s the point here. I don’t think it’s a damning flaw that the game breaks if you refuse to play along with its prompts. that happens with so many games. it’s more that it continues to expect you to participate in its own protracted theater of violence so unquestioningly that it can’t accommodate a player no longer being on board. it reflects a huge blind spot in the games own internal sense of moral purpose. the takeaway to me is that maybe that sequence would have better been a cutscene or just omitted entirely. what would be lost? like at a certain point these sequences work against whatever message the game is trying to convey if they’re that scripted and inflexible. for me at least this kind of thing takes me out of the experience because it assumes way too much on my part. I can tolerate it as a cutscene.
honestly the last of us part 1 makes the exact same mistake by forcing you to murder the surgeon that’s about the operate on ellie. it’s absolutely gratuitous and not something I wanted to participate in as I was already feeling conflicted about rescuing ellie in the first place and murdering all the other fireflies in the process. ironically I was actually able to perfect stealth that sequence on my second playthrough which I assumed was impossible the first go-round, and that felt a lot better in terms of my own feelings about what was happening, but in the end I still have to murder the doctor. felt even more jarringly dissonant given that I was able to exercise agency to not murder any of the people who actually posed a threat up until then. but I don’t demand detailed role-playing in super linear games like this, I just think if you aren’t going to give me agency over shit like this then don’t force me to perform it in-game, at least let me watch the protagonist do it outside of my control.
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Yeah, as I said above I definitely would have preferred that moment as a cutscene, though while playing it I don’t think the option would have occurred to me as an improvement.
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i feel like an actor in games like life is strange or supermassive’s (or an ensemble of actors in krz). even david cage games and some adventure games
the higher the volume of violence the more i feel like a videogame avatar scoring points, which is fine, but a cheap basis for pathos. this isn’t novel but i don’t think the last of us resolves the tension any better than giving snake a silenced .22 tranquilizer pistol does
i would like to see naughty dog try to make a post-shooter kind of game like death stranding just to have the resources poured into simulating something else. to some extent there’s an audience just looking for fidelity, see generally quantic dream
the new colossus has compulsory revenge murder i like and isn’t trying to be a thinker about the ends or means even when it is thoughtful about why
undertale’s random encounters turn kindness into data entry
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this is the sole interesting part of the first game! I don’t get it, this seems like watching a noir movie and being like “I don’t know… this murder for insurance scheme seems kind of a bad idea… and I think the wife is just using this guy… not sure these are good people for main characters in a story”
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Yeah I actually think the murder in the first game works way better simply because that experience does not take the entire running time of the game to get through. In TLOU2 the “message” is so dull and obvious and slowly taught that it turns what was for some folks an effective character moment into the most boring degradation imaginable
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the embodiment of the character and quotidian rifling through drawers etc. can make a very strong player ego totally unlike (most) film. this is what both lasts of us play with and it’s highly subjective and volatile
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caroline… had the bae or bay debate again in the car. she’d send me to die in the toilets to stop a tornado. a choir of furies in my head, caroline. i don’t know if i can
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