JonB wrote:

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

Final point that I felt whilst playing is that the whole game world/universe or whatever it’s classed as almost feels as though it was developed entirely out of necessity of fitting in with NDs preferred game style. Mechanically and structurally it’s not that dissimilar to Uncharted and it kinda feels that at one point, way back when, this whole bleak world was the one way they could paint their way out being pretty much the only devs out there capable of delivering AAA productions with proper actual characterisation and writing. By making the world so horrible it negates that weird juxtaposition you get in Uncharted of lovely and affable Nate mowing down loads of people before settling back into homelife. In this world murder is simply required to get by and so you still side with the main characters and their actions. I wish I hadn’t thought of this whilst playing though as I think it impacted my immersion somewhat.

This was pretty much how I felt through both games. All the complex emotions and motivations these characters have are cover for the fact that in the end their actions are entirely driven by the fact that they're in a violent action video game.  Joel never made a decision at the end of the first game. It had to end that way to have a final sequence of stealth and murder gameplay. Ellie has to kill everyone she meets because games like this don't have negotiation options. The game drives the plot, not the other way around.

It’s like the time that I looked at one of the Forza Motorsports and it really jumped out that the car was just on a fixed axis and it was the road and trackside rolling towards me that gave the impression of movement.  Once I’d seen it that way I could never unsee it (exactly like that Mexican cartel chainsaw vid I wished I’d never seen) and it’s kinda taken the shine off all racers since.  Those recent Cyberpunk vids with the driving? Put me right off the game, it has.

I’m presuming it was the Edge review that made a jokey little nod to just talking to the monsters again?  This game actually does do that exceptionally well.  It shows shades of grey and develops a feel of actual real life empathy in ways that are really astounding for a video game.  It’s definitely doing some great and worthy stuff, some of it really really progressive and is managing to do that by somehow shoving an ill-fitting stealth action shooter around itself to ensure they all get another go at something as forward thinking in another 6 years.

I was trying to work out what part of the game was gonna become Nates untucked jumper from the first Uncharted but still can’t decide.

Blimey. I was only intending to post the first bit and it turned into a rant.

I’ll go with all that.  I found myself at many points just wishing once I’d grabbed a human I could just knock them out (at worst) and was surprised many times that that prompt just wasn’t there.  I mean there was even a point in the epilogue, where those guys are just big bads ripe for destroying, that I found myself in the perfect position of having a guy in a shit position and I was surprised when my options where simply to kill loudly or kill quietly.

These problems do all rear their heads though because of the high quality the game possesses and, as such, I still don’t want to be too harsh on it.  I also don’t know how you get through this problem really though?  Like I said in an earlier post, this game world was definitely Naught Dog trying to come up with a solution to the criticism that Drake was attracting back in 2009 (or whenever production started on the first tLoU) but rather than trying to find a more nuanced game mechanic than destroy, shoot, fight they chose to keep the verbs the same and change the world, feeling and characters to allow and rationalise them.

They strip out the shooting and killing and they lose a large easy marketable staple of, well, games, and I don’t think they know what they’d put there in place of them.

Other than Jons review where could I go to read up on high quality takes on this? Not reviews so much as quality dissection and opinion? It raises so many questions and discussion points but I’ve no idea where to look?

Okay, I'm going to dive in and read this thread. I know I'm not playing it. I know Joel dies but let's see where this rabbit hole takes me.

hylian_elf wrote:

You’re both putting some of my thoughts into words better than I can. 

I hate not being very articulate.

You and me both buddy

I think this game has made me think more about game design and all its facets than any other.  I don’t think I’m a complete Luddite with game design and development but I’m no Jon or Tempy either and so for such a mainstream game to be able to make me question and query almost everything about the game is quite the achievement.  There’s artistic and technical choices in here that could be broken down for months and months.

There were a couple of scenarios with the infected that were genuinely some of the best stealth/combat sessions I’ve ever had in a game.  The sense of tense stand off, a couple of plans  coming to fruition before the dissent into blind panic and survival were just wonderful, so I think it’s pretty disingenuous to pronounce the game purely character and cut scenes. There’s real quality to many of the mechanics and some of the environmental puzzles are also pretty neat too.  I also really liked tracking down the safe codes, from hunting for WiFi passcodes or finding where the garage was.  The world design is totally hand in hand with the game design, even their version of audiologs actually have relevance to the world here.

They've done a real good job of fine-tuning their basic gameplay. There's an argument that they haven't evolved it that much but I think where they have gotten it to now is a good send off for this generation and hopefully they try and do something new with whatever they're working on next

I had some great encounters with that flow of starting in stealth and then cocking it up and then scrambling to the end. I think perhaps they could have done with more aggressive hunting by the enemies after they lose you, force you to duck and dive and dodge through all the gaps they put into the levels. They went back to their routines a bit quick. But that was just on Normal, not sure what it's like on the other difficulties. 
The scenarios that involved infected and humans were the favourite for me. Finding that balance of setting the infected off and then picking off humans but not too much that I would have both parties after me was great.

I quite liked the safe stuff too, although I think they possibly could have done a bit more to it. Same with picking up items and how that makes you view a gamespace. I'm not sure if it's just me but I found that in trying to find the items I could collect, my vision was very focused on small areas and so it meant that a lot of the time I wasn't really taking in the space I was in and it kind of distracted from the visual design of the space. It was something I noticed moreso after playing God of War which has similar structure in searching around but a lot of the time the things you were looking for (runes etc) are visible from a distance and so I found that I was paying more attention to the detail of the world and space than I did in Uncharted 4 (the closest ND game at the time). Just me?
If I'd have known it existed I might have tried to play with the auto pick up option turned on so that I could just move through and have Ellie etc pick things up for me. It might have alleviated that feeling for me.

Just finished. Just read this thread and my opinions.

Game vs Story - Jonb has written much on this and I’m not going to add to it. It’s a case of it’s still a video game that has you killing stuff and yes, some do the encounters I would have liked to talk my way out of, but that just isn’t going to happen unless it became an RPG.

Ellie vs Abby - after controlling Abby for the first time and then seeing her kill Joel I hated the bitch. Then getting to play her was a brilliant switch. And I think on balance, she is a better person than Ellie. Yes she hated Joel for killing her father and took revenge in the most cold blooded way, but twice she let Ellie live and it was Ellie who couldn’t let it go. Fuck Ellie.

The Minority Issue - I honestly don’t get this viewpoint. In fact it rankles me quite a bit. So what if the leads are women? So what if one is trans (though I just took it that she was a big woman)? So what if there are a lot of minorities (I’m one myself)? How many video games have been made for decades where the main protagonist is a white guy. One game out of thousands decides to do something different and it becomes an issue. Completely ridiculous.

Where’s Jon’s review?

Cheers

Hey Boris. Abby isn’t trans - she is just a strong, muscular woman.  Lev is trans and that was the reason for being ostracised.

WTF I missed all of that then. I thought Lev was a boy with a really squeaky voice? I don't remember seeing anything about him being trans...

This is all priceless.