I know there’s systemic reasons for this in the thread but
She [Ellie] has several Heart Rate States that are split by tension and whether she’s sprinting or not.
Virtual Tension-Sensitive Cardiology.
The reasons for the implementation make sense but I can honestly say I never really noticed the breathing or attributed it with greatly improving my experience. I don’t really remember hearing a lot of changes in breathing due to music, non-diegetic stealth/environment indicators, gunshots, footsteps, and enemy barks.
Very much the “respectable prestige TV drama” version of “horse testicle temperature control modeling”.
What is a better example of gilding the lily?
Ultra realistic modeling of incredibly minor body and nature systems in an action adventure video game that no one will notice
The post-release tweet threads explaining that each models exist and how they work, explained in such detail that there are sub-chapters requiring decimal points within your 25 parts (1.1/25)
I feel bad ragging on these people as this is technically impressive at some level, but this is so gaudy. It seems a lot of this stuff purely existed to maintain a steady stream of “tweet threads”, GDQ talks, reddit threads revealing what’s going on behind the hood.
This is the sort of thing that should save work. Horror games have used the protagonist’s breath sound as an effective embodiment technique for a long time, they just had other systems for triggering it: trigger volumes because the level is played in a linear sequence, piles of unorganized rules ('after sprinting for X seconds, when enemy X is nearby, when player is below Y% health).
Instead of utilizing bespoke rules to trigger this content, they simulated it. I love using simulations to solve problems in game. This is not an obnoxious one – very few inputs and outputs that ought to result in fewer time spent dealing with bugs, at the cost of time to set this up.
Of course, having created a logical, ordered system, they are freed up to pour more assets into it – the real increase in cost. If you were playing this on a more restricted budget, I’d say: build the simulation, but only use it for 5-6 assets per character. What’s effective in creating an emotional reaction in the player are the specific hyperventilating, exhausted, and gasping sounds when they are being threatened. Those ones matter.
in flashbacks, both abby’s dad and owen have intense needling youth pastor energy and I’m glad that in the present of the game(s) I held the guns that murdered them
Ellie finds Nora collapsed against a door. She disarms her of a pipe and then hefts it herself. Some threats are issued. It’s clear what’s going to happen. A button prompt appears. The player hits the button. Ellie’s face goes angry, and she swipes with the pipe, causing blood to fly across the screen accompanied by a wet tearing sound. We do not see Nora. We are in a reverse shot, seeing only Ellie. Nora gasps and tries to recover, but we have another button prompt, and when we press it the motion repeats. Ellie does it a third time, and in the middle of a scream from Nora, in the middle of yet another wet ripping, the screen cuts to black.
This cut is structurally anti-Black because it does not allow the visual universe of The Last of Us Part II to consider the racial coding of the violence that Ellie is performing in the scene. This is slightly different than the representational racism that we see in other places in the game, most notably the giant, hulking Black man Abby fights near the end of the game. He’s so visually stereotyped that he might as well be from a David Cage game, and his ability to continue surviving in the face of the extreme damage done to his body over the course of the scene evokes the racist stereotype of always-bigger, stronger Black men. In the case of that fight, though, there is nothing about the camera work or the framing of the scene that differs from any other in the game. He is mis represented but the way that he is represented is not any different from anyone else.
That’s not the case for Nora. Her death is closed off from visuality itself. It is unwitnessable, unconsiderable. The cut to black is a cut across time and space, eliminating Nora as a person who we’re supposed to have thoughts and feelings for and instead transforming her, ironically, into something that happened to Ellie. In the scene that follows the cut, Ellie returns to the theater where Dina is hiding, her hands shaking, and experiences a moment of care. The torture and death of Nora is considered in the game only in the effect that it has on Ellie, as if the decision to torture someone is something that happens to you instead of a choice.
Of course, it’s not Ellie’s choice because Ellie isn’t real. She’s a fictional character who exists at the whims of the hands of a team of creative professionals at Naughty Dog who wrote and tested and reconfigured this scene over years. We’re supposed to forget that artifice, though, and the complete obliteration of Nora to quickly get back to Ellie and Dina’s moments of sincerity is emblematic of what Neil Druckmann said around release: “We want you to try to empathize with that character, understand what they’re doing, and say, ‘OK, I’m going to role-play … I’m going to try to think the way this character thinks.’”
What’s being spoken over here is that the work of developing the game is setting parameters on what the player can think when being so strongly focalized on a character. That framework, the formal structure of the game, is one in which a Black woman is killed by the protagonist while the game itself is unwilling to engage with representing that violence. There is no body. There is nothing left of Nora but a specter that exists entirely to be consumed by Ellie’s guilt-ridden whiteness. The entire visual framework of Part II’s universe bends toward the exclusion of Blackness as anything other than death to be absorbed and processed by whiteness. No dignity, not even in death.
There is no logic to it. This exclusion can’t just be due to the severity of the crime. After all, it’s not that much later that we see Ellie kill a pregnant woman, something so bleakly evil in this world gone to hell that it is almost post-apocalypse parody. We see people slowly murdered by being stabbed in the throat over and over again. We see someone shot in the back of the head while they’re facing the camera, blowing a baseball-sized hole through their face. We watch a child get their arm smashed with a hammer. We see people hanged and gutted. The Last of Us Part II revels in all of it.
We don’t even know what happens with Nora’s body. Presumably she’s still down in that hole, liquefying into fungal growth.
played thru this on hard mode the last few days and i gotta admit: i loved it. i thought the story, tho definitely clunky at times, was thematically enormous, and meaningful. i need to sort out my thoughts tho
designwise it’s like a greatest hits of the lats 20 years of AAA action game design. you got some resi 4 in here, you got some half-life 2, a bit of bioshockiness maybe, spoonful of gears of war, and RELENTLESS EVER-PRESENCE of metal gear solid 3. as a huge kojima fan i found it interesting to finally see someone actually trying to pick up that football. entire stretches of this felt like the hollywood remake of metal gear solid 3 (the kind of hollywood remake that ends up being weirdly good) to the point where i would consistently hold X to lie prone even after literally 15 hours of playtime, and there’s also a lot of mgs4 and mgs5 and even death stranding, accidentally.
the parts that feel like TLOU1 (small, isolated encounters separated by looting and talking) are a bit of a slog, or sometimes a lot of a slog, but the lengthier and more layered set pieces are stunning, to say nothing of the heart-pumping Interactive Movie stuff
EDIT: okay i will say one thing lol. ppl saying the game has no message or theme besides “wot if violence was bad” are, i don’t even know how to relate to that. when i see that take im like, were we playing the same game? were you just, committed to engaging with this game in bad faith? christ, like you can say the game is dumb or you didn’t like its themes or that it didn’t express them effectively but to act like the game isn’t loaded to the gills with moral and thematic messaging touching on a variety of subjects, and not just those related to violence, strikes me as absurd!
My only beef with the story was that they were maybe a bit heavy handed with the constant parallels.
Hell, they even manage to fulfill a bad joke made early on in Abby’s campaign, when Manny tells the WLF soldier who got shot in the hand that when it comes to fingers, “you only need three,” and then by the end, well!!
I can’t really imagine playing through the game again anytime soon, but at the same time, this is maybe one of the most satisfying stealth games I’ve played since MGSV?
I mean, I’m a huge baby and played it on normal, but the balance felt really good.
Yeah, the constant web of foreshadowing and parallelism and such was a lot. But hey, honestly? Given the sort of writing you normally see in these things, a dev trying–if overzealously–to go for the literesque breaking bad sort of stuff is fine by me. more of it, please!
abby rules! she learned her lesson at the end of her story and showed grace to ellie!
i will say i was confused about one element of the ending: didn’t the slaver dudes say repeatedly that abby had been infected??? but the ending is shot as if she and lev get to sort of ride into the sunset. did i misunderstand something?
I think one of the prisoners said she had tried to escape, which is why they strung her and Lev up on the beach.
I will give it to 'em, though - they succeeded in getting me to really sorta despise Ellie and dread pretty much every moment after the first bit at the Farm.
I saw people say they had a hard to coming to grips with having to fight Ellie in the theater, but smashing her in the face with a bottle and wailing on her was…maybe uncomfortably gratifying, given the shit Abby went through up to that point.
On the flip side, that fight on the beach was absolutely miserable to carry out. Like, every button press felt like pulling teeth.
