The Last of Us (PS3) - TTLG Forums

newguypaul on 21/6/2013 at 04:40

Yeah, I also thought it was pretty obvious that Tess was going to die rather early on. You never really saw her in any of the promotional stuff so I knew she wouldn't last long.

Angel Dust on 22/6/2013 at 03:00

Finished it and, wow, that last scene and exchange is fantastic.

"Okay"

The game though? A very good 3rd person shooter with some nice exploration/scavenging/crafting elements but still beset with the same problems as any other. The die/restart cycle does not do narrative heavy games like this any favours and a lot of the combat is unnecessary and overlong, being merely an obstacle you overcome to get to the good bits. So, despite the brilliance of some of the characterisation and story, the magnificence of the location design and just overall polish, I can't see myself playing through the whole thing again for a long, long time.

Sulphur on 7/9/2013 at 19:32

Quote Posted by Malf

Minor subtle ending spoiler in this paragraph: Sarkeesian's recent "tropes" videos, as mentioned in a previous post of mine, have really coloured my vision regarding videogame stories, and The Last of Us struggles to escape the "Damsel" trope and ultimately fails. What a shame. It's quite a moving example of the Damsel trope, but still that trope, just the same.

Having just finished TLoU, I can understand the minor niggles people have with certain bits but here, I don't see what you mean. The entire Ellie/David sequence was meant to show how she's able to take care of herself, and she does that ably. Joel doesn't save her, he comes along just in time to get both of them out of there.

And yeah, Nolan did a fantastic job as David. Then again, he was one of GlaDOS's spheres in Portal 2, and The Penguin in Batman: Arkham City, so the man clearly has talent.

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Mild spoiler regarding Ellie (safe to read if you've gotten outsideof the first QZ): her being the key to a cure for the infection is a lazy zombie story trope and this is where Walking Dead had it over on The Last of Us in spades; Walking Dead just tells a human story about a man and his adopted daughter. The Last of Us makes it about saving the world. If I wanted that, I'd play any one of the multitude of power-fantasy games already out there of this kind.

Major end spoiler here: HOWEVER, Joel lying to Ellie at the end does give the story some punch. It makes his choice all the more obviously selfish.

But it's not a power fantasy. The game puts you in this head space to tell you that people are flawed and ultimately make the wrong choices; that's what makes them human. The ending is perfect, because it's Ellie's tacit approval to the lie - which she knows is a lie. Her Boston story is the lead-up to that. The game was never about 'saving the world'; hell, it doesn't even let you make that choice in the end. It'd be another thing if the game played the 'mankind in peril, and you can save it' card for cheap attempts at character drama, but there's nothing cheap here. Everything was earned, including Joel's initial resistance to projecting the image of his dead daughter onto Ellie, and then failing anyway. I'd say in terms of emotional complexity, the acting and the script outdoes TWD.

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One thing I hate about the linearity of Naughty Dog's games, and this is something the Uncharted games could be just as guilty of: It can actively punish exploration by locking areas behind you if you nudge too far forward. This means if you're undecided between 2 paths, the game can lock you out of some rewards if you unknowingly go too far down the story path.
The biggest offender here for me was during the sewer sanctuary area when the paths seem to split. You and Ellie seem to go one way while Henry and Sam appear to go another. Ellie opened a gate for me saying "Voila", at which point I thought I was missing something else so before entering the gate, poked my head along the other route to see what I was missing. When I saw the water room, I went to go back to the gate that Ellie had opened only to find my way blocked. I had missed out on something purely because I was being curious and trying to cover all exploration bases. I hated Naughty Dog at that moment, and this highlights the problems with developers scripting games too tightly; it removes player agency.

Yeah, that's an irritating thing when it happens, but there are other games - like Remember Me, which I'm playing at the moment - that do it to a far more egregious level. You could even read it as a gamification of choice and consequence, even if you didn't know you were making a choice by simply moving forward, but that'd be a bit of a stretch. Still, it's not something that'd actively change my opinion on either ND or the game as it's a very minor thing, so I'm sort of nonplussed that it could generate such a negative reaction from you.

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Shortly after the sewer sanctuary is an open street section where you're pinned down with a sniper.
While I liked sneaking from building to building, I hated that I couldn't get an angle on the sniper as Joel had suggested. There was no sniper to aim at, just an unmoving gun in a window that shot back at you. This was incredibly lazy; they should have at least let you take out the sniper only for him to be replaced with another. It really jarred with the otherwise high production vales, taking me back to the days of FPSes experimenting with new ideas and quite often getting them wrong because of engine restrictions.

I agree, I kept trying that spot from different angles, but when I zoomed with a scope, I could see there was no one manning the gun. A pretty odd miss in a game that's usually more polished than most.

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I'm also not sure that the genre fit the story very well. It could have done with being more open-world, less third-person-shooter. In the end, it's basically search area, kill guys, cutscene, rinse, repeat. It's incredibly polished which makes that easier to swallow, but it really is quite restricted as a game.

Survival horror template. As there's been a massive dearth of survival horror games of any real quality for the past bunch of years, I'd rather have that than another point and click adventure like TWD (if only for variety's sake, TWD is very high on my list of games with fantastic narrative), but it could have done with a bit of trimming in terms of combat encounters. You could see it was being padded out for the sake of length in a lot of places. The incidental detail is tremendous, however, and makes inching through easier to swallow most of the time.

Sulphur on 7/9/2013 at 20:56

Also, over at Ars, I just came across (http://eat-games.tumblr.com/post/55627570901/interview-nate-wells) an interview with Nate Wells, the Lead Art Director on The Last of Us. I'm sure we can agree that TLoU is pretty exceptional when it comes to art design and direction, and more than holds its own when compared to anything Quantic or Crytek ever came up with.

It's a pretty good read because it goes into a nice amount of detail over various points of his career, from when he started out working on the cutscenes for Thief: TDP at LGS and then moved on to Irrational for SS2, Bioshock and Bioshock: Infinite, and then onto The Last of Us. It even mentions Irrational's lost game... The, uh, Lost, and he waxes eloquent about the direction they took with SWAT 4:

"So we conceived the world as an East coast city—but it's not an East Coast city—it's an East Coast city through the lens of David Fincher. It's like Seven. It's always dark, it's always rainy and things are always unbelievably grim.

One of the very first missions you go to this Chinese restaurant which is under an overpass, it's like it's in Queens. It's this horrible little restaurant and upstairs is an apartment which is being leased to the person you're trying to find. You get to the apartment and it's dirty, there're clothes and beer bottles everywhere, a game console, and then you go into the bedroom and see that there's this little child's playpen. So you know there's this horrible, dysfunctional, probably abusive family living here. The guy you're looking for is in there, and depending on your tactic you either arrest or kill him—and that's it. That's it! It's just this ugly, ugly, ugly place to be!"

Gabucino on 9/9/2013 at 11:08

> a game that's usually more polished than most.

Woman sidekick constantly clipping through the main character <-> being more polished

Choose one.

Sulphur on 9/9/2013 at 11:56

c) Fuck off.

Contribute, or don't post. We've had enough people being stupid for shits and giggles already.

Gabucino on 9/9/2013 at 12:09

Quote Posted by Sulphur

c) Fuck off.

^youngster being angry at the internet

faetal on 9/9/2013 at 13:18

You do know that presumptions make you look stupid right?
Like the presumption that Sulphur is young and that you are qualified to tell everyone the meaning of their own response.

Gabucino on 9/9/2013 at 13:36

Quote Posted by faetal

You do know that presumptions make you look stupid right?

Your opinion of me is relevant to the topic, because reasons.

faetal on 9/9/2013 at 13:43

I don't have an opinion of you, but your comment about Sulphur being young because he decided to be snippy with you, has all the credibility of a dog in a cape.