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

Should we tell him he’s just about to hit the halfway point?

Is he actually? :lol:

jiggles wrote:Should we tell him he’s just about to hit the halfway point?

SEVERAL PEOPLE HAVE SAID THIS AND I DON'T KNOW IF THEY'RE JOKING.

they better joking be as I'm finding the motivation to continue quite hard now.

Seriously. Can someone tell me how long I have left?

jiggles wrote:
Tafdolphin wrote:I genuinely, genuinely thought we were done. We should have been done.

This is Tarantino levels of indulgent now.

I hope you’ve been reading Ellie’s diary throughout or else you’re going to have to go back for all that motivational nuance

I have been. It's a poor man's RDR2 journal

Cuttooth wrote:Is he actually?

There’s less than an hour left

I think the journal made me dislike Ellie more than her actions

Tafdolphin wrote:
jiggles wrote:Should we tell him he’s just about to hit the halfway point?

SEVERAL PEOPLE HAVE SAID THIS AND I DON'T KNOW IF THEY'RE JOKING.

they better joking be as I'm finding the motivation to continue quite hard now.

Seriously. Can someone tell me how long I have left?

jiggles wrote:
Tafdolphin wrote:I genuinely, genuinely thought we were done. We should have been done.

This is Tarantino levels of indulgent now.

I hope you’ve been reading Ellie’s diary throughout or else you’re going to have to go back for all that motivational nuance

I have been. It's a poor man's RDR2 journal

Be sure to keep checking it all the way to the credits. I found the very last entry to be extremely important in contextualising what many have called inconsistent or far fetched motives

Will do!

I still prefer tafs journey to Herbies.
One had pre conceived ideas but was willing to still try it.

The other is just salty cause factions wasnt included.

Ellies diary is great, btw.

Also its more than an hour taf.

Its 3 or 4.

Denster wrote:Also its more than an hour taf.

Its 3 or 4.

Maybe if you try to stealth it like a little bitch and absolutely not how the game is trying to suggest you play it. :roll:

Im still scared of the big black stereotypes. So I stealthed it all the way.

Denster wrote:I still prefer tafs journey to Herbies.
One had pre conceived ideas but was willing to still try it.

The other is just salty cause factions wasnt included.

Ellies diary is great, btw.

Also its more than an hour taf.

Its 3 or 4.

What?

Why would you be salty about Factions? They gave ample heads up it wouldn't be there and the game is 30hours long FFS.

I didn't have a problem with the Abbie vs Ellie boss fight. I think I died once, but it felt pretty deserved. I thought it was really cool tbh, like you were actually fighting against a character in the way you'd previously been playing them with the use of traps and molotovs and Ellie's general situational awareness.

OrangeRKN wrote:I didn't have a problem with the Abbie vs Ellie boss fight. I think I died once, but it felt pretty deserved. I thought it was really cool tbh, like you were actually fighting against a character in the way you'd previously been playing them with the use of traps and molotovs and Ellie's general situational awareness.

Not sure if it was just me, but the second stage started with me backed into a corner with a shotgun toting Ellie right next to me. I died multiple times within the first 5 seconds of the fight just trying to get to cover.

Like I say, thematically I loved it but mechanically it was straight up broken.

Also worth mentioning that I've accidentally spoiled myself on the ending at this point. I genuinely thought I was done so looked up some game trivia and... There it was.

'Broken' is harsh. Though I understand it must have been gooseberry fool for you and ruined it.

Yeah, probably. It's a cool idea but the game clearly isn't built for that sort of one v one encounter. Broken is harsh, but I definitely didn't have any fun with it and the constant instadeaths really took me out of the moment.

The trouble is it doesn't follow any rules established by the rest of the game.

Never in the rest of the game do you have to dodge obstacles for fear of making sounds, and the only enemies that one hit kill you have to be completely up in your face, and you can shoot them before they get there to defend yourself.

Not only that but there were a few times where I snuck up properly but because Ellie wasn't "stunned" she just turned round and instantly killed me.

Having all this information being communicated to the player through failure instead of training them, in such a pivotal moment of the story was just a terrible decision.

They should have done something similar with the big Bertha boss fight from earlier to train you.

I smacked a brick into her face a few times and it didn't stun her at all. A block animation played which as far as I know doesn't happen anywhere else in the game. This is the only time you have to wait until the R2 prompt to throw something at her.

It was very frustrating.

The "boss battles" in the game were terrible. They are something Naughty Dog struggle with, in both this series and Uncharted.

The problem with TLOU design template is that you're too powerful in stealth mode.

You have an instant kill button, hearing mode, quite a wide open environment with cover, paths of unbroken cover through an environment so you're never out in the open for too long.

You have vulnerabilities to counter this - the enemies turning round or doing something unexpected (though all A.I. in games like this is generally programmed so they don't do anything too unexpected and they are meant to have big blind spots, the enemies hearing you if you move too fast, your guns creating a racket and silencers being limited, combat being punishing in terms of resource drain and vulnerability etc.

So what it generally does is force all your advantages away. That's the only real idea they have with boss battles.

You get forced to play in the open. You get forced into small, cramped areas. You get forced to blast your way through. These compromises and restrictions feel artificial - especially when you've fallen through a floor *again* into the den of a big infected *again*. Or walk through a small gap or door to get bumped *again*.

The stealth is satisfying, though after 30 hours of it, and the only real change up being the dogs, it is starting to feel a bit formulaic.

But if the stealth encounters become routine and low on surprises, then the boss battles often just become exercises in frustration. As you're forced to play the game on ND's terms or have to deal with a new set of constrictions and rules on you.

When I was forced into combat with the bigger infected, all I kept thinking was that the gunplay and monster battles were still deeply inferior to stuff like Resi 4, which is nearly 20 years old now, and that they just don't play to the games' strengths.

They need to rethink those encounters, or just stop with the adherence to "boss" battles.

And that's before I get started on the crappy scripted ones or bloody QTE "battles".

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

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