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The Last Of Us 2 - now with protagonist-murdering trannies

Reinhardt

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Sep 4, 2015
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31,996
"It fallen 80% in sales of the second week but that means nothing , plenty of games have that kind of drop, besides, most games are digital these days. The controversy didnt affect sales. See the huge number of trustworthy positive user reviews ."
:thisisfine:
Sad, but he is actually right. The game broke records with its sales, and as with any AAA games, the majority of the sales are in the first onr or two weeks.

So how many people are now excited for tlou 3: new adventures of abby and some dog owner.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
"It fallen 80% in sales of the second week but that means nothing , plenty of games have that kind of drop, besides, most games are digital these days. The controversy didnt affect sales. See the huge number of trustworthy positive user reviews ."
:thisisfine:
Sad, but he is actually right. The game broke records with its sales, and as with any AAA games, the majority of the sales are in the first onr or two weeks.

So how many people are now excited for tlou 3: new adventures of abby and some dog owner.
I don't know, but you can bet that the next game will also sell a bazilion copies.
 

Alphons

Cipher
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Nov 20, 2019
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They'll make a prequel with Joelo and call it a comeback of a fan-favourite character.

All those angry Redditors will preorder D1 and YouTube will be filled with adult men crying in reaction to Joelo reveal trailer.
 
Joined
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So how many people are now excited for tlou 3: new adventures of abby and some dog owner.
I expect no less than Joel to return in tlou3 by any means necessary.
i expect a full white male cast for the next installment, it won't sell for shit because of this trainwreck and they'll blame the cast for it. "see? no one wants to see male anymore, the future is in trans disabled minority 2millionthgendereds".
 

Terenty

Liturgist
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Nov 29, 2018
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There was info that after 16 days in the wild the game performed worse than Spider-man after the same amount of time and a tiny bit better than God of War, having beaten Gow in sales with 900k more copies sold on the first day.

Given that Tlou 2 had the biggest opening among all Sony exclusives, but ended up worse than Spider man and almost on par with Gow, i'd say it has worse legs than it was supposed to. So maybe there's hope.
 

Drakron

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Messages
6,326
There is also development costs, GoW and TLoU2 started development in the same year, 2014 and even you want to argue about they only completely shifted to work on TLoU2 after Uncharted, that was 2017, in fact Spider-man also started in 2014.
 

Decado

Old time handsome face wrecker
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ESPECIALLY because there's clear and convincing evidence that the whole 'JOEL SACRIFICED HUMANITY TO SAVE WORLD REEEEE' isn't even true.

She wasn't even the first, or even the 2nd immune that the Fireflies had found and killed. They'd already cut multiple ones apart, and they STILL didn't have a cure. And even IF they succeeded in finding it, they're all fucking scumbags, they wouldn't distribute the cure to everybody out of the goodness of their hearts.

Joel 100% made the right decision, and Cuckman and staff literally spit on his grave trying to make him wrong.

This is actually biggest sticking point for me in the new story (I haven't played it, so I might be missing something).

At the end of TLOU, Joel is supposedly given an impossible choice -- let the FFs kill Ellie because she is immune, and theoretically they can extract a cure. Or, take her out of there and let the infection continue to run rampant. It's a classic utilitarian paradox, a version of the trolley problem: do you kill one person to save many people?

Of course, the paradox loses its weight when you consider several factors:

1) The FFs are murderers
2) There is no presented evidence that they can actually produce a cure from Ellie and, in fact, there is evidence to suggest that they have been failing at this task for some time
3) They never asked Ellie for her consent, presumably because they knew she would say no.
4) She is basically his daughter at this point in the game.

There is so much about this story that makes no sense. I feel like I'm watching an alternate reality universe where ND just had to make Joel the bad guy in order to do a muh both sides nuance on violence Vox Explainer, but really, I'm struggling to see what Joel did wrong. It's astounding, really, how many people have suggested there is some moral quandary here.

Let's review the bidding: the FFs capture his daughter, kill a bunch of people in the process, and then plan on murdering her to possibly make a cure for this disease. The answer for Joel in this situation is astonishingly easy: they have no right to be doing any of this. To go back to the utilitarian paradox, it's actually pretty easy to take a principled stand on saying "I will not allow you to murder a child in order to save other lives." As far as I'm concerned, you've got free pass to kill as many of those motherfuckers as is necessary.

Now, Ellie might be upset because she feels some kind of survivors guilt, but that is hardly Joel's fault and any self-actualized adult should be able to work through that complex set of emotions and realize the real bad guys are the ones who captured her and were ready to dissect her fucking brain.

Reading the story lines of TLOU2, I feel like I'm seeing Babby's First Moral Philosophy homework assignment. It is clumsy and amateurish.

ETA: A far more compelling story would have been to see Abby's quest for revenge, but then abandoning it (or struggling with it) upon learning that her mother and father were actually terrible people, ready to murder a child. And that her hatred for Joel may be justified, but he did something that was defensible, if not morally correct.
 
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Potato Canon

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Jan 1, 2017
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47
This is actually biggest sticking point for me in the new story (I haven't played it, so I might be missing something).

It doesn't really matter to the main plot of part 2 whether Joel was a "bad guy" or not, or whether his decision from the first game was justified. What drove the plot was Joel killed Abby's father. The reason why he did it wasn't a factor in Abby's decision to take revenge. It could have been a complete accident.

Nothing in Part 2 tries to "make Joel the bad guy", it's the same character as the previous game. The first game points out at several occasions that Joel is capable of "bad" things. The second game portrays his death as tragic and is sympathetic towards him and makes him even more likeable throughout the whole of Part 2 in various forms of flashbacks.
 
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ad5463ffb483a9e91ee0bf203e7de42a82207ea931b0e7666e9bff767e4e004e.jpg
 

gerey

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Reading the story lines of TLOU2, I feel like I'm seeing Babby's First Moral Philosophy homework assignment. It is clumsy and amateurish.
It's the stereotypical post-modernist nihilistic tale that every narrative (((auteur))) keeps shitting out thinking he's being oh so clever.

I recall someone in the thread comparing the vibe to that of the Souls game, and I disagree. TLOU2 and its ilk (RDR2, Max Payne 3, GTA V etc.) are mean spirited and vile, they want to drag the audience down to the gutter with them and let you drown in the fecal refuse they're made of. The Souls games are often nihilistic, sure, and the fates of the characters tragic and hopeless, but there's always an undercurrent of hope, a spark of nobility to their struggle, and the player's struggle to save a dying world.

TLOU2 wants to make you feel like shit, Dark Souls wants to hammer in the kind of struggle you're facing, the odds you are against, and the real worth of the sacrifice you are making to keep the world turning for just a little longer.

There's no moral to the story of TLOU2 other than "You need to feel like shit because I got a stiffy thinking about killing Palestinian children".

ETA: A far more compelling story would have been to see Abby's quest for revenge, but then abandoning it (or struggling with it) upon learning that her mother and father were actually terrible people, ready to murder a child. And that her hatred for Joel may be justified, but he did something that was defensible, if not morally correct.
What I find most funny is that the most direct way of actually developing a cure would have been to facilitate the breeding of people that have the immunity. Not only were the Fireflies failing at finding a cure, they were actively sabotaging the chances of humans developing immunity to the disease by killing off individuals that could have passed the immunity to their progeny.

Naturally, to acknowledge this would also force the Jew to portray Ellie as selfish for being a lesbian and refusing to get pregnant, and that's not kosher at all.
 

Decado

Old time handsome face wrecker
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Codex 2014
This is actually biggest sticking point for me in the new story (I haven't played it, so I might be missing something).

It doesn't really matter to the main plot of part 2 whether Joel was a "bad guy" or not, or whether his decision from the first game was justified. What drove the plot was Joel killed Abby's father. The reason why he did it wasn't a factor in Abby's decision to take revenge. It could have been a complete accident.

If this is true, then the writing is even dumber and more empty than I was imagining.
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
The Souls games are often nihilistic, sure, and the fates of the characters tragic and hopeless, but there's always an undercurrent of hope, a spark of nobility to their struggle, and the player's struggle to save a dying world.

I think its more complex then that, in the first game you have the choice of keeping the First Flame alive or leave and let it die and that is if you want to prolong the current status or let things run its course because I think they pointed out that the Dark wasnt evil, humans if I recall come from the Dark and the whole thing is far more complicated ... the second game original just had one ending and then the expansion added a second ending that is the same thing, keep the order of things or allow the coming of the Dark, that is change.

TLoU2 theme is revenge is bad but seems to fail at pointing that out, I suppose a lot because it suffers from pacing and this aint ND fault or rather, anyone but the director and narrative leads, also he can be smug now but wait a few years or a political climate change and lets see how it holds up when he doesnt have a cheerleading squad behind him because muh social politics.
 

DemonKing

Arcane
Joined
Dec 5, 2003
Messages
6,574
Finally finished...game would have been better if they ended it with Elle staring at the map Tommy left rather than the unnecessary epilogue gameplay sequence.

While I think the underlying politics are too in your face, it was certainly an interesting blend of gameplay/art (or attempted art). Definitely worth a play.
 

Decado

Old time handsome face wrecker
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I guess when I sit and think about it, the problem that looms larger than the game itself is the morally lazy idea that all violence has to be judged with the same weights, which ends up creating a ground so shaky that nobody could ever say something was right or wrong. The best example of this is the ending of the first game, where Joel actually makes what could be the most justifiable and least morally confusing decision in the entire game: kill the people who are ready to murder a defenseless child.

For this to be weighed ex post facto as some kind of deep, murky moral abyss is not only lazy, it is immoral itself. If the story cannot bring itself to say that engaging in violence in the defense of an anesthetized teenager -- who is about to be murdered and have her brain harvested -- is okay, then as far as I'm concerned it cannot say anything of value at all. We should not trust a word that comes out of its mouth.

The counter argument here is that Abby doesn't care, that she is acting out of emotion and she just wants revenge. If we grant this is true, what is it saying about her character? That she doesn't care that her parents were killed to prevent them from committed child murder? Okay. She's a fucking moron, then. What fun is it to play as a fucking moron? But worse, to give Abby a chance in the story (to be "fair" to her character) is to actually be unfair to player -- why should any decent person give a flying fuck what it is like to play as someone so fucking stupid and ultimately evil? What's to be gained?

"Violence begets violence!" is therefore hurled at the player as a lazy shibboleth. Apart from being untrue (anyone who has ever punched a bully in the nose and successfully prevented further bullying, or anyone who has defended their home from a break-in, can attest to the uselessness of this idiotic phrase), it's not even useful as a rhetorical teaching tool because sometimes the chain of violence is perfectly justified, and sometimes it is not. It is sometimes the case where being violent is the correct course of action. Joel had a case, Abby did not. End of story.

Ellie's story is perhaps more interesting and certainly more nuanced, but she just seems to be your garden-variety sociopath who is now addicted to combat and killing. Okay. The issue is, her wanting to seek revenge for Joel is mirrored against Abby's desire for revenge re: her parents, as if both parties have a similar level of grievance. If you believe that revenge is a morally justifiable course of action, then certainly the guilt/innocence of the party in question has to enter into the equation and we're back to square one: Ellie's actions would in some sense be more justifiable -- perhaps even more "moral" -- than Abby's because she is avenging Joel, who let's remember did the right thing.

Ellie is obviously unhinged and suffering from some pathology, up to and including PTSD. And while her individual story may be more interesting, the moral arc of the story is not; it is, in fact, the same shit you've heard over and over again about violence: it's all bad, all the time, don't think about it, if you question it you're a moral monster, and hey did you hear MOVIE STAR CLAPPED BACK at her detractors???
 
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MapMan

Arcane
Joined
Aug 7, 2009
Messages
2,330
I can already see the headlines in a few months on sites such as IGN etc. "TLOU2: REVISITED - WAS THE STORY REALLY THAT GREAT???"
 

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