@captainlove I remember a statistic from a few years back that people were talking about which said there are more dogs than children, and more dog owners than parents in Seattle.
made a gamefly trial (in 2020!) just to play this crud
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dogs are cool, but none of this stuff in the game (or a more authored dog scene later) did anything at all for me.
they are also an annoying enemy type. im not sure what the intended way of dealing w them is supposed to be, but i was just launching molotovs at the start of an encounter to hit them and their owners.
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Molotov spread seems to do it. I assume they have low health pools so any splash damage is good. Often Iāll just stab them and take a bullet just to get them out of the way.
honestly, for a lot of encounters in this game, you can just open by throw molotovs from behind cover while the enemies are huddled giving expositionary dialogue.
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this is the first naughty dog game Iāve played to have what seems to be a reasonable encounter rate instead of me getting to a part where I think āokay this is an enough number of peopleā and that always ending up signaling the 1/3rd of the way through the fight. itās still an absurd number of people for these creepily realistic looking people to be killing single handed but okay. and itās nice they let you just walk around for so much of the game. pretty good walking to shooting ratio.
I guess the sicario soundtrack is the official sound for descending into amoral violence land
I like that instead of this game being about some build up to ellie learning the truth of the end of the first game sheās already figured it out but is still going all out on her vengeance mission for joel anyway. my interpretation of the look on her face at end of the first game at the time was she knew she was being lied to but it was an implications too awful to begin consciously thinking about or acknowledging kind of situation. nice the game didnāt go the dumber less interesting route there.
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i just finished this
which came as a surprise, i was starting think it somehow would never end
i remember feeling like i might be near the end and then thinking, ah, no, canāt fool me, thereās gonna be another big beat after this somehow, i played uncharted 4, i know what theyāre capable of
but i did not know what theyāre capable of
hey if you see me giving blood potions for calling this game garbage donāt mind me iām just being petty. i havenāt played either last of us and I donāt think I will. For all I know it could be my favorite videogame in disguise!
(unlikely, but, you know, it could)
but I donāt think I need to explain my petty hate feelings I think everyone in this thread is in the same wavelength regarding minority character torture porn, hyper-expensive videogames that require immense overwork while at the same time being extremely too long, drudging and mechanically unexciting to hold my interest, and the shallowness of prestige videogames
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seemed to me like the violence stuff in this was a thing that seems to happen a lot now where people who havenāt or donāt want to play the game hype the out of context fragment they heard about 2nd hand passed through a game of telephone up to be the Worst Thing ever and then when you actually play it itās just fine or a who gives a shit thing. I remember when phantom pain was also definitely going to be the most offensive numbskulled thing of all time and that was also a big nothing.
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yeah, Iāve been burned by this before and this is why I said in my post that it could be my favorite videogame ever. because, you know, it could! I love Yakuza 0 and itās a game that has a side-quest that is unequivocally transmisogynistic! Itās a story that loves machismo and relegates women to incredibly narrow roles! It has side-activities of owning a cabaret and ogling at idols! And any criticism of Yakuza on a gendered lens is completely valid, and anyone who says āman, I super donāt wanna play it because of those thingsā are also valid. For all I know my feelings on The Last of Us could totally spin around if I play it, excusing all these criticisms through the context of the game and my enjoyment of it. Iām 99% sure I wouldnāt like the game if I played it anyway, but at the end of the day, living vicariously though criticism and poo-pooing on the game for my perceived peeves about it, and because it represents a lot of industry-standards that I hate, mentioned in my post above, is free and makes me feel good.
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yeah i hadnāt read this thread at all before i played and i stayed as dark as i could be on any of The Discourse, and the only impression i had coming in was that like polygon thought it was too violent and that maybe you killed a dog in it?
i guess my honest impression after playing it is that itās not that Bad, though iām hesitant to address anything brought up in this thread just now because i didnāt realize how heated some of it had got. i will say i never felt like the game was, like, trying to make Me feel bad for My Actions, and instead it felt fairly straightforwardly like just a story about miserable people who canāt stop trying to do violence to each other because theyāre so miserable, though i admit that maybe if some game-makes-me-feel-guilty shit is in there i just wouldnāt see it because thatās inherently nonsensical
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I mean Iām skipping it because the idea of the same jokers who put me through the misery of three awful uncharted games making a game thatās deep and Meaningful is a terrible enough concept the idea of playing it would sound extremely tiring already.
Like at best itās nothing, at worst itās traumatic to some folks, and either way people had their lives destroyed by crunch to make a thing that at best is aping the endless shallow HBO and HBO clones on tv.
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I donāt think I can recommend it unless youāre really interested in accessibility options in games. It is literally a gold standard for accessibility now. If youāve played other recent Naughty Dog games thereās a lot of similar stuff here. If you didnāt enjoy them thereās nothing here that will change your mind.
I donāt think Iāve got to the bit that got people worked up earlier in the thread. Then again I have been avoiding spoilers as much as I can. Looking forward to seeing the takes once more people have finished.
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Seems pretty clear to me that the ultimate take on this one is gonna be āthey made one of these againā
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yeah ādonāt you feel bad for doing the only action this game allows you to doā is just inherently dumb nonsense but I didnāt get the impression the game was going for that anyway
itās a violence game like dog days is but this oneās about exploring who the normally faceless npcs youāre hurting in these game are. I think thatās an interesting thing for a game to try. not gonna be the most uplifting thing to play but I donāt think anyone is going to accidentally stumble into a game like this unawares
also the mechanical stuff isnāt actually a tedious slog this time.
also I gotta say I know thereās kind of a blacklash against po face prestige show stuff nowadays but personally Iām definitely not longing for the days of 22 episode season non serialized goofy mr monk type shit being the norm
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I mean you could have shows like Deep Space Nine and Farscape that had arcs and individual episodes worth watching. Including arc episodes where stuff would actually happen before the final episode in a season.
Just because HBO/Netflix endless television novels are a different kind of bad from episodic bad doesnāt mean theyāre not still bad.
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thereās an infinite amount of good TV that is in neither category, like this is a screenshot of my NAS
false dichotomy
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I donāt see much in there I like that isnāt usually considered āprestigeā
yeah like, I know youāre trying to make a point felix but you canāt use dragonball as a non-prestige show come on
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what if we horned it up a little tho ?? 
Yeah, Iām just catching up on this thread too. I didnāt follow the game at all after its reveal and only knew about people complaining about the violence in the news thread, which lead me to impulse purchase it one night it to see what all the fuss was about, so some of this other content in this thread I didnāt know about.
I think this is the game of the generation. In that it so strongly follows the design mentality of the generation that you can predict every gameplay beat before it happens. You can read the gameās rhythm and tell exactly what paths the game wants you to walk through to progress and what side walkways are going to be dead ends. You can feel ahead of time through what passages youāll find an enemy encounter and and in what areas youāre going to be safe. You can tell generally what patrol route enemies and zombies will have (if you didnāt already notice theyāre just walking in a square by seeing their footsteps) and you can tell when a game is going to try and trick you with enemy placement; like enticing you to follow an enemy for a stealth kill but then they suddenly turn around or a new enemy comes around a corner just as youāre supposed to reach your target.
Itās one of those roller coaster type games that Naughty Dog specializes in where you know going in that you are supposed to follow the ride as Naughty Dogs directs you. Otherwise itās going to fall apart. So maybe being primed ahead of time to come into this cynically based on the hearsay didnāt help- and I was already not interested in the idea of a sequel or the tone that first announcement trailer tried to sell- but I did not like this game at all.
The game doesnāt make any effort to re-invest you in the characters or even re-invest you in the old characters so I never felt like I cared about what was going on despite how dramatic the cutscene direction, and ultimate it just all falls flat and feels vapid. Thereās a big dramatic scene that sets off the main thrust of the game and I think I was supposed to be sad and angry but I was more confused that it was happening already before I could care that it happened. It also doesnāt have a lot of subtlety and makes sure Dina repeatedly asks Ellie āare you going to hurt So-and-So, you might not need toā so Ellie can vocalize again and again 'yes, I want to hurt so-and-So even if I might not need to because they hurt my friend". But outside of that exchange that happens multiple times, there didnāt feel like there was much of a story or character development. It feels like the game wants itās small talk to be character development but hearing Ellie and Dina walk about a fake movie has not endeared me to them or taught me anything about them, their relationship, or their place in this world.
Most of the game was walking and talking, which I now guess is what sets apart a prestige game from everything else. You hold forward to go through a long stretch of scenery, youāre speed automatically adjusting to account for your distance from any NPCs youāre following or loading times. A lot of the game time feels like it could have been shortened into a cutscene because I did not feel my meager bit of interactivity contributed to my immersion. It instead annoyed me because I had to hold forward on the stick and L1 to run to make the characters go forward instead of the game doing it for me.
Outside of that most of my time was spent walking through empty houses picking up crafting material I never needed because combat comprised relatively little of the gameās runtime, and itās fairly easy even on Hard. The environments can be wide but often times there isnāt much of interest to see off the main path. A lot of the time the various corners and pathways exist to create the sense of space but arenāt meaningful to explore.
The oft-talked about violence- unless something changes tonally I might be inclined to think that this is the gameās marketing being wildly successful. None of the violence or tone feels much different from the standard. Melee kills are normal video game attack animations. If gun shots are doing something to bodies you canāt see it because youāre shooting from far away. Since everyone has names, instead of people seeing a dead body and going āMan down! Someoneās here,ā they instead say āSteve! Man down! Someoneās here.ā
I didnāt reach any of the stuff with the trans character (thankfully?) but there is a bit at the beginning of the game where characters talk about Ellie getting called a slur at a bar the night before, and then she goes and confronts the guy. Then the guy and bigotry in general never come up again because I guess it was in there just to make sure you understand that the world can be bad?
At about the 4 hour mark I started considering quitting but decided to play a bit farther since it took that long to finally encounter the first human enemies. But Iāve called it quits at 7.5 hours, just reaching the title card of Seattle Day 2. It was just boring me out of my mind. And itās supposed to be like 30 hours? Someone get this game an editor.
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