Five years ago, Joe and Ellie walked through the apocalypse and into our hearts with the cinematic The Last of Us. Developer Naughty Dog’s tale of survival and parenting in a post-apocalyptic world beset by bandits, freedom fighters, and moldy zombies told a heartbreaking story and left everyone wanting more, despite an ending that seemed pretty final. During PlayStation's State of Play event today, the company delivered new gameplay footage and dropped the release date for the game's sequel.
Idk y’all. I say this as someone who actually loves the first last of us… this continues to look like a completely unnecessary and self-indulgent sequel.
Also? The violence? I’m concerned for the workers who have to model all of that. I know I’m not the only one who read about the workers at Netherrealm who got PTSD from working on Mortal Kombat 11. I bring this up because I think I read in an interview that Naughty Dog was doing the same for this.
Workers shouldn’t have to consume snuff material so that corporations can extract their surplus value. Or at all. Personally, I’m fine with stylized—even STRONG stylized—violence and gore, but I think once you have your employees watching videos of executions for your game you might’ve gone too far.
There’s a difference between like… B-movie gore—excessive but clearly imaginative—and the real thing.
Remember those halcyon days of that last E3 trailer where there was at least some chance of a queer relationship not ending in brutal tragedy? Good times.
Hell I liked TLoU more than most, but this sequel just seems like Naughty Dog are drawing straight from the Game of Thrones school of nihilistic violence porn with how every trailer (minus the aforementioned E3 one) has made me feel like I’m watching Funny Games but with Zombies.
shoutouts to naughty dog writing a gay character that somehow managed to die before the game even came out so you could put your white dude protagonist back in
In the announcement trailer Ellie is super pissed and on her way to murder everybody. As soon as I saw her girlfriend in the E3 trailer I had a pretty good idea of what Ellie was about to be super pissed about, unfortunately.
“Fridging” tends to be one of those words I often roll my eyes at because it’s in the same category as “Mary Sue” as a term that people throw out to avoid doing the analytical leg work to actually explain why something is bad, but gee, I sure can’t wait for her to end up with a dude and for the devs to call it bisexual representation.
I’m trying to formulate why the idea of this game just isn’t grabbing me as much as the original did, and it’s not so much the violence or the problematic subtext that’s turning me away, I think this just looks a bit fucking dull.
I was really crazy about the first game and after that gut-punch of an ending, I think I was ready for a sequel, but of all the possibilities for continuing the story “revenge quest against an unknown faction where the third act twist is blindingly obvious” just feels a bit anticlimactic? I guess? Maybe it was always a bad idea to even attempt to follow up TLOU 1?
I don’t know, these are all just commercials at the end of the day, and advertising firms are notoriously bad at showing off games imo, but I can’t shake the feeling this will be a huge, overblown, disappointment
This world seems so damn dated. Zombies in 2020? Sure.
More than that what is even going on? Why do I want to revisit this terrible place? The lore in the first game was subpar at best. So this time its some other group you are already told to hate and so you just get revenge? Man I dunno. Multiplayer should be fire tho.
I feel like TLOU didn’t necessarily market itself as a big important game like this one is. Sure, they very much played up how dark and nasty it was going to be but this now feels like some Oscar bait shit ala Uncharted 4.
Also, this looks almost visually identical to RDR2. I do not need all my big flashy games to look the same.
Not a fan of the fist game so I don’t feel too much about this. But I still kinda doubt that Ellie’s girlfriend will die, but only because (spoiler for 1) that already happened in the first game. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit. Regardless it’s safe to assume some other terrible thing happens, so I guess it doesn’t matter that much.
I wanna believe there’s some Kojima-esque misdirection going on with the editing in this trailer and that’s not what ends up happening in the game. It seems too obvious that everyone would hate that. Maybe the Joel shot is early in the game and he’s the one who dies?
