The Last of Us II - 60 fps PS5 patch out now

Ellie: Season 2
Abby: Season 3

(They absolutely shouldn’t do this)

24 style split-screen

(the boat ride to the island will conveniently take the length of an ad break)

jiggles wrote:Ellie: Season 2
Abby: Season 3

(They absolutely shouldn’t do this)

And pretend to conclude it on S3 but wait! Surprise! Ellie's back for a completely unnecessary mini Season 4

OrangeRKN wrote:I always thought of the name calls etc. as an immersion thing and not an emotional manipulation thing. It makes the combat more fun!

Orange: i like to know the names of the people I'm brutually killing, it's more fun!

It's more fun to have more of an illusion of intelligent opponents. Them barking more believably to each other and seeming more reactive is more fun, like how if you try and shoot an empty gun they will shout that you're out and press an attack.

It’s certainly to make you feel something.

The Last of Us Part 2’s Co-Writer Halley Gross said that every single Last of Us 2 enemy in the game has a name, and those who are with them will yell their companion’s name when Ellie deals a deadly blow. These details were added to humanize those that Ellie is up against and make players think twice about their interactions with non-player characters.

“Even in gameplay, we want you to feel the micro-hard choices these characters have to go through,” she said in an interview. Players can either choose to have Ellie fight her way through enemies and confront them head on or sneak her way around them and risk being caught.

It’s a neat trick to humanise the enemies specifically to make the player dehumanise them as they rampage, as the player character also does. Instead of the game dehumanising them for you by default due to them being nameless, faceless goons.

In the few streams of TLOU I've seen I always loved the conversations that the enemies have, then the reactive ones shouting out where you are to each other, they also mourn for their friends. Very impressive.

TLOU is probably the only Sony IP I'm genuinely interested in.

jiggles wrote:It’s certainly to make you feel something.

The Last of Us Part 2’s Co-Writer Halley Gross said that every single Last of Us 2 enemy in the game has a name, and those who are with them will yell their companion’s name when Ellie deals a deadly blow. These details were added to humanize those that Ellie is up against and make players think twice about their interactions with non-player characters.

“Even in gameplay, we want you to feel the micro-hard choices these characters have to go through,” she said in an interview. Players can either choose to have Ellie fight her way through enemies and confront them head on or sneak her way around them and risk being caught.

It’s a neat trick to humanise the enemies specifically to make the player dehumanise them as they rampage, as the player character also does. Instead of the game dehumanising them for you by default due to them being nameless, faceless goons.

I think this is silly! The game is better without making player choice an aspect of it, especially when the game makes clear you don't have agency as a player and are playing out Ellie's story rather than shaping it.

The choice of sneaking or fighting is a mechanical one, I'd rather it be about gameplay preference than some (false) narrative choice.

I’m saying it’s more about you inhabiting the character as an actor would, not that it’s about you choosing who the character is. She’s saying she wants the player to feel the character’s micro-hard choices, not that these are choices for the player to make.

Whatever way you choose to play each encounter is canonically what the character does, but the dissonance comes in if you’re mowing through people and the character doesn’t carry that at all, yet suddenly feels it when the person has more narrative importance. Likewise, if the player feels nothing but it’s weighing on Ellie, it breaks the relationship between player and character. There’s no pacifist option. You can’t escape the fact that Ellie and you are doing horrific things to meet your objective, and it’s far more interesting to have the player feel that than be gleefully slaughtering everyone only to have a cutscene or something where the character says something insulting like “I’ve done bad things” to tell them off.

jiggles wrote:I’m saying it’s more about you inhabiting the character as an actor would, not that it’s about you choosing who the character is. She’s saying she wants the player to feel the character’s micro-hard choices, not that these are choices for the player to make.

It makes sense to me put like this. I was put off by the framing of combat as a player choice but I get it this way, as a way of aligning empathy. The player should know that Ellie knows she is killing people.