[Itse]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

This is just entirely... wrong. You've stated this with some conviction but it's utter nonsense. The zombie apocalypse setting is a bit tired now (less so at the time), but even that is done in an interesting way by use of the cordyceps to create enemies that are kind of this mix between terrifying and beautiful. The notion that the most dangerous ones are blind but use echolocation while the less advanced still have their sight creates the basis for a good stealth experience.

Eh. Sorry, it's a super generic setting with uninteresting level design and clunky mechanics. The excuse for what the zombies are this time does not actually affect the setting in a reasonable way, and it's still super super unrealistic.

The game design also isn't very good. The clickers will still "hear you" for no reason if you're close enough in front of them but not at their back, which shouldn't be how echolocation works, and the "runners" don't actually see that far but actually hear you to a point that there's really no significant difference between how they react. The only significant difference between a "clicker" and a "runner" is that the former are tougher to kill.

And don't get me started on "bloaters", what an embarrassment that was, sheesh. How the hell am I supposed to take anything serious after that?

And let's talk about the problems of that setting. What are the zombie hordes eating? In fact, what does anyone eat? Why is everyone living in squalor after such a long time? Have they forgotten how to clean up? Why aren't there any patches in anyones clothes? Why doesn't anyone wear mismatching clothes? Is everyone still fashion conscious, even though they seem to have stopped bathing

More generally, why are people concentrated in urban environments, when it would make so much more sense in every possible way to set up in the countryside. (Smaller population = less zombies, a lot more space = easier to build defenses, running natural water and natural food sources would be available...)

It's almost as if the makers forgot that "generic zombie setting #1" is typically set only a rather short time after the apocalypse. The world functions exactly like the typical "zombie apocalypse was recent" setting, but since the writers moved things too far into the future, the generic things stop making even the modicum of sense they usually make.

It's also why it's impossible to ignore just how generic everything is, and how little actual thought was put into most of what the game is.

But what's really wrong here is the notion that the characters are generic. That's an absurd statement. They're actually deep and well developed, and they grow as the story goes along, largely through their interactions with each other rather than with the plot. That's what's different. That doesn't mean that actual character-driven storytelling is some revelation, because it isn't... except in videogames. If this were a movie, it would not get an oscar best picture nom - actually, Logan, to which it is often compared to for obvious reasons, is a pretty good comparable. But until other games start doing this, telling a tight and cohesive character-driven story (which I gather you only got a little way through), TLoU is miles ahead of anything else.

Deep and well developed can still be generic. The protagonist is just a slightly older and grumpier than usual average AAA protagonist, and Ellie is just a generic "likable teenage girl character", which is actually a massive problem because so much of what Ellie says makes no sense for a character that's supposed to not know about the world before the Apocalypse. How does she know how to make fun of something like "checking into a fancy hotel"? It's cute, but makes no sense.

Well, you're pretty clearly playing it wrong, or on a difficulty that's far too easy for you. If it's on a hard enough difficulty you should really be killing very few people and sneaking past most of the enemies, except where forced to fight. It's primarily supposed to be a stealth game, and it creates tension very well.

The main part of the stealth game is killing enemies. This is by far the best strategy. Sneak up on people and kill them. How am I supposed to be afraid and feel tension, when I can just sweep through a house in an afternoon and clean it up from anything threatening?

The level design is also kind of ***t. It's random block of stuff thrown around with no rhyme or reason. Why does every corridor in this house have random furniture pieces thrown around? Where did they come from? They don't look like they belong anywhere in this place, and there's no reason why anybody would have moved them here. Why are they all the same? Please just for the sake of variety, could you throw in maybe a higher piece somewhere (can hide behind but can't jump over) or something that will block the way but not the view?

No, apparently that would have been too much thought put into this.

Why is this hotel that they just specifically said was supposed to be so fancy (fancy enough that a guy who apparently used to own a pretty nice house could not afford to ever stay in one) so crappy when you get inside it, with all the rooms being super small and impersonal and all the furniture looking like it was 20 years old by the time of the apocapypse?

I guess the writers and level designers just never shared notes.

And why is the loot random? It makes absolutely no sense. Suddenly a runner will drop a proximity bomb, but a guy who clearly has a gun and bullets does not have them when you kill him?

It makes even less sense when there's hard limits to what you can carry, so that if they took a bit of time to consider how they pace different different enemy types, there should be no problem if in some encounters you could stock up on bullets. (Not that being short on bullets is a serious problem anyway.) All random loot does is remove what few pieces of strategizing might be involved in the stealth slaughter mechanics. "That guy has a gun, I might want to take him down for those bullets" becomes "I should take down everyone I can because any of them could have something useful".

Oh, and how come I can make frickin' proximity bombs out of sharp objects and alchohol? It's just beyond ridiculous, and such a boring choice. Setting up a trip wire and trying to lure a zombie into it would at least require some tactical thinking, but they needed to make it proximity bombs because... I've got nothing. It's just dumb.

The best way forward is constantly killing enemies as you move forward by sneaking up behind their back. Which is what I'm doing. Again why am I supposed to find this scary, when I can just massacre about 20 "hunters" in an afternoon without breaking a sweat? It doesn't really help that Ellie goes "sheesh" for the twentieth time when I do that. Freak out or shup up, but eh, that's not good.

Why is there such a large bunch of people constantly keeping patrol to kill and rob anyone who comes down a certain road, when every other thing told in the story heavily suggests that there shouldn't be that many people travelling around, and there's even a note in the game listing what they've found on the travellers, to underline that robbing them makes no sense because they don't have that much interesting stuff on them Also, why is it an all male gang? Is it an all gay gang, or are they all aromantic asexuals who just don't care? Why do they choose to live in a mostly defenseless house in slum conditions, when they could have bunkered down and cleaned up? Is it just because they're bad people so it didn't occur to them?

So, it's just a generic "bad for no reason" gang, with not even a spoonful of effort put into making them interesting or believable, but since super generic zombie apocalypse setting #1 has to have gangs like that, there they are.

Regardless, it is still trying to be a video game, not a survival simulator. That being said, the mechanics are certainly a bit clunkier 7 years later than they were when it came out.

The controls weren't very good for the time. I played it first when it was about a year old.

This is where your already well-off-base post completely falls apart. None of these, with the arguable exception of Disco Elysium (and in fairness I've never played Tides of Numenera and probably should), has better writing, and none of them have better performances. The notion that Witcher 2 and 3 are better written is so laughable that you should really give up posting on this topic ever again.

Your lack of taste and understanding of what is good writing and what isn't is so bad it's cute to see you try. But don't worry, I'm sure that if you try really hard to understand subtlety and complexity, you'll start to slowly understand this stuff.

(I'm just making fun of your incredibly condescending attitude here.)

I've said before that those are good games, but they're written exactly as badly as the average pulp fantasy novel and the characters have exactly that much depth and development to them as you'd find in that sort of material.

It's fine, totally tolerable and at times enjoyable, but it's "video game context" fine - in other media, it would be unbearably cheesy. I've seen arguments made for Planescape Torment - which I'm surprised not to see on your list given that Tides is - but even that is still pulp fantasy, it's just more carefully crafted and philosophically interesting pulp fantasy.

Look, dude, stop saying pulp fantasy, you clearly don't know what that actually means.

Witchers 2 and 3 are dark fantasy, mostly. (Blood and Wine DLC steers heavily into high fantasy.)
Witcher TV series is pulp fantasy.
Planescape torment is high fantasy. It's also a game that's good for it's time, but super dated now.

Also, saying "just pulp fantasy" is a pretty good indicator that you consider genre to be a designator of quality.

Too bad for you. The characters in Witcher 3 are very, very well written, with a lot more nuance and complexity than most of what's going on in TLoU. Obviously Witcher 3 has orders of multitude more writing in it, so the quality goes up and down a lot more than it does in TLoU... But the good stuff just blows anything TLoU does out of the water with complexity and nuance.

In any case, Last of Us isn't very well written. It definitely has some good things going for it, but the world, the characters and the gameplay are in constant conflict with each other, to a point where I find it impossible to take it seriously. Any time I'm drawn into the game for a moment, there's something around the corner which makes me go



and pulls me out of it with it's sheer stupidity.