Starker on 25/6/2020 at 15:00
I figured there would be some shenanigans like that. And it's probably all poignant and slick, but can't help getting the impression that it's them wanting to stuff their faces with the serious cutscene story cake and still have their violent fun gameplay murder cake too.
The Austin Powers stuff I was referring to were these ones:
[video=youtube;Ag_AFraxj-4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag_AFraxj-4[/video]
(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD3w_VdTG30)
henke on 29/6/2020 at 18:17
Finished it.
When I was first getting close to the end of the first game, a few years back, I felt like it was a great game and I was dreading the ending. Not because of where the story was heading, but because I was sure the developers were gonna fuck it up. They had built such great, tragic characters over the course of the game, but how could they possibly end it in a way that was true to these characters? No way a big-budget AAA-game could do that, instead it was probably gonna end with a big dumb bossfight and some contrived "happily ever after" ending. What happened next left me with my jaw on the floor and the feeling that I had just played one of the best games ever made.
I really didn't want a sequel, out of that same pessimism. No way the developers can continue this story in a way that's true to the characters, right? Well, they did it, this entire sequel is very true to Ellie, Joel, and the ending of the first game, and if you've played the first game you can probably guess that this is a miserable fucking story. At least the first game had this hopeful idea waiting at the end of it, that all this ugliness was going to be worth it in the end, but there's no such silver lining here. 3 hours in you're pretty sure you're on the wrong side of this tale, and 20 hours later that point has been driven home over and over again.
So, yeah, if you wanna have a bad time, play this game. It's great. Please, Naughty Dog, don't make a part 3.
zajazd on 29/6/2020 at 19:29
Abby > Ellie
Sulphur on 29/6/2020 at 19:30
Excellent. I've always wanted more misery porn in my games. Ah well, I guess I'll find out soon enough - it'll be time to get started on this puppy soon enough. How about dem graphics, doe?
fucking hell, henke, you done gone and summoned jajazd, 2020 is officially even more ruined than it was a minute ago, and that was a physical impossibility
henke on 30/6/2020 at 11:41
The graphics are so reliably great they're not even worth commenting on.
One more post about the gameplay: I played it on Hard and you really have to play it as a stealth game. Not only is ammo scarce, I was straight up terrible at aiming in this game. Couldn't hit shit for like the first half of the game. Luckily you have a lot of other tools at your disposal: bricks, bats, bombs. And just because you're spotted doesn't mean it turns into an action game, you can still run away and hide. Just because your enemies wanna have a shootout doesn't mean you have to. Eventually you learn to turn your disadvantages to your advantage. Maybe you get spotted and have to blast some dude away with your shotgun, now all his friends are going to come running! Ah, but you know they haven't seen you so they're going to run to the place where the sound came from, meaning if you slip into the other room quickly you can circle around and come up behind them! Figuring out tactics like this on the fly makes you feel like friggin Rambo. I'm Rambo, guys.
As for "Abby > Ellie". Yeah! And no. Abby is more sympathetic, but I still think Ellie is the more interesting character. Perhaps because we've spent more time with her, she has more layers to her personality.
Renault on 1/7/2020 at 17:43
I just finished this recently too. The actual gameplay is fun, and it's great trying to stealth your way through each "encounter" as they call them. I played on normal, so resources were abundant, but the majority of the time I didn't really need them because I was doing the stealth thing. I focused on either stealth takedowns, or using the bow (which allows you to retrieve your arrow if you get a headshot). Abby required occasional resources to make shivs, and once in a while I did use silencers (which also required resources) because they're kind of fun. The layouts of each area are constructed well, forcing you to come up with an actual gameplan, and timing everything properly. Running and gunning rarely turns out the way you want it to. I wouldn't mind going back to play each encounter and see if it's possible to actually ghost them.
*Spoilers, you've been warned*
The narrative/story is what really let me down, personally. Besides the game just being overwhelmingly violent and downright depressing, which has been mentioned before, almost every character in the game is just not likable and didn't really have any redeemable qualities. Ellie, who was of course amazing in the first game, just turned into a shallow, one dimensional revenge driven killing machine. At every turn, she seemed to completely ignore common sense and reason, and I was just rooting for her to die by the end of the game. Her late game awakening was not convincing, and I've never cared so little about a finale as this one, I just wanted to get it over with.
Abby showed some life and indicated she might give a damn about things going on around her. She also does lots of bad things, but seemed to have a lot of regret about it. She lets Ellie off the hook twice, even though overall she's lost so much more. Her taking Lev under her wing was somewhat reminiscent of the Joel/Ellie relationship in the first game, although it took a while to be convincing. I would gladly play a third game that focused on Abby and left Ellie out of things completely. The other characters just didn't do much overall - Dina, Tommy, Jesse, Owen - they provided some dialogue but weren't great characters.
I'd say overall too, the game just didn't have a the emotional impact of the first game. About halfway through, I was really feeling beat down from all the violence and all the people I had killed, and it all seemed so senseless and without any kind of point to it. I almost quit. The game redeemed itself just enough during the island portion, and that kept me going through to the end. I thought the scenes on the island with the Seraphites and WLF just wiping each other out and the villages burning down were very poignant, and it at least brought some emotion back into the experience. At one point, Lev says "They're killing each other" and Abby just replies with "Good," indicating she's had it with both factions, one of which she recently belonged to.
Not much else to say I guess, except that the game was more exhausting than fun to play. I guess I'm glad I saw it thru to the end, but it will never be as memorable as the first game to me. I really don't know what the devs were trying to say here, except that people are bad? I feel like they could have come up with something a little more inspiring and thought provoking.
Renault on 4/7/2020 at 05:30
It's Ellie, btw.
And to be fair, it's more like a 50/50 focus between Ellie and Abby. Ellie gets the first half of the game, and Abby gets the 2nd half. Near the end you'll briefly switch back and forth between the two.
henke on 4/7/2020 at 07:07
Well, Brethren, I don't agree about the characters. I think they're interesting, and my favourite parts were when the gameplay paused and we just got to hang out with them for a while. I agree it's an exhausting game tho. Mostly I'm feeling exhausted for the characters, and I sometimes wondered how our protagonists had the power to keep going and not just lie face down and die. There were also a few parts where the game threatened to go on for too long. I gave out a long weary sigh when
the perspective switched to Abby, Seattle Day 1. I was like "I get it, game. The people on the other side are also PEOPLE. We don't have to do this WHOLE THING!", but then she runs into some unexpected new friends and the story takes a turn I didn't expect and I was intrigued again. Overall tho, I think they could've trimmed out some of the gameplay sections, maybe cut it down from 25 hours to 20 and had a better, tighter game.
Quote Posted by icemann
Yeah no thanks. I'll stick with finishing the first game off at some point.
I've been wondering if the people complaining about Joel's fate in TLOU2 even finished the first game, and I'm more and more suspecting none of them did.
SubJeff on 6/7/2020 at 21:30
I'm trying to find the time to start this.
There seems to be a row about it with death threats involved.
People really are idiots.
Thirith on 9/7/2020 at 07:47
While I think that Naughty Dog is one of the best companies at doing what they do, I do feel there's a tension between the gameplay and the story in terms of the pacing. For the story to work better for me, it'd have to be tighter, yet there are stretches of gameplay that, while they work as gameplay, are at odds with the emotional urgency of the story. Naughty Dog does each of these elements of the game well, but sometimes it feels like they're isolated from each other. Part of me loves that you sometimes can explore Seattle relatively freely, along the lines of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, but it doesn't altogether fit with Ellie being hellbent on revenge. They try to make the two halves fit by having the characters talk about how they need supplies, but it still feels to me like ND is serving two masters: the ones that want an engaging, well-paced story and the ones that want content, content, content. TLoU2 is by no means the first to run into this tension and they're not even close to being the worst offenders, added to which I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have minded much 15-20 years ago - but at this point I do often wish that developers (and gamers, clearly) didn't often think that a game has to be at least x hours long. In terms of pacing, I think it would've worked better for me if we had a more tightly paced main story and an expansion or a sidestory that's less immediately affected by the main story.