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Dina gave me two critical headshots at 2:25 and 4:25.
I will never hate on Dina's AI from now on.
Still got shot by one random WLF, I guess having a no damage run requires a lot of luck.
Abby is an inherently good person looking to protect humanity and Ellie is a psychotic monster wearing a person mask, so yeah, this tracks.
Gameplay-wise, playing as Abby really made me think of Rambo (I mean this as a good thing), First Blood of course not the later nonsense. Focused and tactical, using stealth but also with a 'I'll just fuck you up if I get my hands on you' vibe.
The next game will be titled "Abby: The Last of Us Part III" where she travels to Vietnam to rescue Fireflies.
Well, Ellie is no longer completely unstoppable on the WLF water level
On Survivor+, you could live underwater, jumping in and out to lose the patrol. Grounded said "nope." Can't even see how long she has left under the water lol
On Survivor+, you could live underwater, jumping in and out to lose the patrol. Grounded said "nope." Can't even see how long she has left under the water lol
There's so many tiny windows of time that they can sneak in something on you, a no hit run is like impossible.
Yep, I give up no damage on grounded since I will have more health kit than needed if I melee more and avoid using molotov.
I've still have learned how to crowd control better and avoid hits. Melee on Grounded is a great way to learn this game.
I had never seen this trailer before:
It's beautiful. How many songs did Ashley Johnson record for this game??
It's beautiful. How many songs did Ashley Johnson record for this game??
Still waiting for them to release the full cover of this song.
aaaaany day now
LOL that bait and switch.
I love the song and the direction is badass in this but there's something about the way the faces are designed that throws me off.
Yeah that's true. I think it's actually better in game.
(except at the beginning of the museum flashback. As much as I LOVE the dinosaur scene, Ellie's face is kind of weird throughout all of it.)
(sorry, Aestivalis)
it's inspired by this cover btw. It's cool they included it in the OST.
Yea it's crazy how much more melee can really change a lot and for practice compared to tlou1.
I was so bad at melee on my first playthrough... Thankfully I could get better at it because it's an absolutely essential skill at higher difficulties!
I think Cascina Caradonna (Dina's face model) said she actually had to do the facial capture for that trailer, rather than Shannon Woodward. So that at least counts for Dina, guessing it's not Ashley Johnson behind Ellie either.
It's really not the same style we're used to see in the game, though. Maybe the cinematics in this trailer were outsourced?
Yea I was too, just didn't expect it too be that indepth and important. I guess that's why you get the Abby tutorial so early.
Speaking of her, in her most recent video she mentions that she's finally started the game and videos will be coming in the near future.
I'm just so happy this came out. I played the remastered first title again with my GF so we could play the second part together. Did that over the course of a couple of weeks (was hard to avoid spoilers in the time, but managed). And now she keeps telling me how much she misses the game after finishing it.
She's team abby all the way! I'm in between.
she's gonna play it again now! Really happy that it means so much to her, because the first meant so much to me. and of course the second one also.
She's team abby all the way! I'm in between.
she's gonna play it again now! Really happy that it means so much to her, because the first meant so much to me. and of course the second one also.
That's my guess. And maybe done with minimal mo-cap and more via a straight up animation studio?
I'M STILL SO BAD AT IT. Honestly, I can't seem to figure out the dodge for the life of me. I played on hard+ but had to drop the difficulty down for the part in the woods as Abby where you gotta do all the melee and dodging.
It is really a special game to play along with someone you love and have endless diacussions. I am thinking about playing It with my girlfriend, she is not into games, but i think she will like this one!
I can only recommend it! Start with the first one, let her play if she wants to, any difficulty.
Just tell her to treat it like any tv show you watch together, but its interactive. It's a great experience to enjoy it together. Let me know how it goes!
It's the uncanny valley problem in animation - the closer you go to realism the more finer details really matter.
I just happened to see this because my local liquor store is doing a drawing for the Ellie edition of the game. But if any of you guys are into beer, apparently a brewery made a tie in beer and they're also doing a drawing for PS Pros.
www.boulevard.com
Space Camper + The Last of Us Part II - Boulevard Brewing Company
www.boulevard.com
To be honest, for me, Kratos as an angry man was always a very shallow interpretation of the character, based solely on his portrayal in the first two games. I've played every God of War game bar the mobile title, and while the first 2 GoW games definitely laser focused on uncontrollable rage machine Kratos, I think God of War 3, Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta in particular, did a great job of rounding out Kratos as more than just a wrecking ball of testosterone and toxic masculinity (though believe me, there is also still plenty of that in each title). The primary difference is that they don't really challenge or question those notions like GoW PS4 does.
In 3, we see seeds of what will become GoW PS4 in his "relationship" with Pandora, and Chains of Olympus has a pretty powerful moment of gameplay and story concerning his deceased daughter, Colliope, and Ghost of Sparta's entire narrative centers around Kratos and his relationship with his brother Deimos, as well as his mother, which, at the time, I thought gave us a nice look into his character beyond just ripping enemies in half and murdering Minotaurs with their own horns.
I think God of War PS4 works so well because of the history of the first 6 games in the series, and actually challenges and changes Kratos, while still not shying away from his past adventures, and the fact that he's most assuredly a selfish, angry asshole that is far from heroic. Like Joel, Kratos isn't a hero. He has moments where he sets aside his selfishness to almost, almost do something not self serving, but it's almost always self serving in the end.
I think he's a pretty awesome character. Ditto for Joel. They're flawed, brutal, selfish, and 3-dimensional characters, despite the GoW games clearly having emphasis on the brutal combat and supernatural elements compared to TLOU 1 and 2.
Thats fair enough. I think if I had played the other games before GoW 2018 I probably would have seen his character differently. Tho I do really enjoy GoW3. Especially from a technical perspective. The game still holds up to this day and I always found the boss fights to be fun brutal affairs.
And yea, I think Kratos' actions at the end of GoW3 did lay some groundwork for the type of character he'd become and its great Cory and his team expanded on those ideas. I think GoW is such a surprise hit this gen. Like I knew it was gonna be great but who would have guessed it would be been this revered title lol
Watching my gf and roommate play it right now. It's glorious.
Did the same with the first one
highly, highly recommend
Because these games open with highly emotive storytelling hooks, pretty much anyone used to TV and cinema storytelling is on board immediately
I posted this video on another thread... I couldn't help but be reminded of TLoU2's ending and the discussion surrounding it:
I would do that if I had anyone to play it with, lol. Both games definitely are unique in that way that basically no other games are.
I feel like "people being emotionally destroyed by TLoU2" should be it's own genre of entertainment.
I think Queentofu had straight up the most intense response to this, and watching how she reacts to the Abby switch, Yara and Lev, the Ellie fight, the Farm, and the final fight is going to be straight up popcorn entertainment.
Not sure if joking.
The most immoral act commited in the game was done by Abby.
Relentless torture of someone who saved your life moments before.(and forcing their loved one to watch helplessly)
At least everyone Ellie killed was in self defense and she was more justified in pursuing Abby since she physically saw her commit the act.
I won't lie, it is entertaining :p
*cough* Nora *cough*
And can you really say you killed in self-defense when you initiated the fight or conflict? There are a lot of examples of that throughout Ellie's part of the game.
But seriously, one of the points of the game is that there isn't one better than the other. They were both suffering immensely, and it led them both to commit atrocities and lose a lot in the process. That's why the game goes out if its way to show how they are both a mirror of each other in a lot of ways.
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Same lol. I have faith in SSM to deliver a kickass game, but even as a huge GoW fan, I didn't expect it to be as well received as it was. I also didn't expect it to acknowledge the previous games as much as it did. Like, I thought maybe there'd be an Easter egg here or there, but not full on acknowledgement and, in a way, finger wagging at Kratos and his shitty actions.
I appreciate that they didn't just gloss over it either, and had Kratos wrestling with that aspect of his past in how it potentially affects his son, and how Atreus already has the seeds of becoming like Kratos within him already.
Such a pleasant surprise of a narrative for me
Is it time to post it again? I used to have to say this all the time in the first round of spoiler thread.
If you played through this game and managed to get that you were supposed to have empathy and understanding for Abby, but are saying things like "Ellie is a monster" than you have missed the point exactly as hard as anyone saying "fuck abby she killed joel."
If you played through this game and managed to get that you were supposed to have empathy and understanding for Abby, but are saying things like "Ellie is a monster" than you have missed the point exactly as hard as anyone saying "fuck abby she killed joel."
The WLFs were shooting tresspasers on sight.
Nora pinned Ellie down and made her watch. She also taunted Ellie about Joel's death and ordered soldiers to shoot her.
I also believe Ellie would've let her go had she gotten the information another way.
A also think Ellie was subjected to the greatest amount of suffering during the course of the game and I don't think Ellie and Abbie are morally equivalent. I could explain my stance in detail but I am too tired.
I'm replaying through the first series now, to get a refresher on how Kratos was in the past games. I disagree that any of the past games meaningfully made him a rounded character based on my memories, but I'm hoping that may change as I play through them. Like you said, the parts of him 'caring' were mostly just accents, not something there to truly challenge the character. GoW3 is actually the absolute worst of these, since it does some of the work of setting up to challenge Kratos, but then just abandons them.
And, after a lot of thought, even though I am a MASSIVE fan of GoW2018 and approve 95% of what they did with Kratos as a character, even it falls short of truly challenging his actions of the past games.
This is more of an end part, but Kratos' monstrocity is emphasized to be....that he committed patricide. As in, that the guy he killed was Zeus, his father. Now, I can tell you that of all the things Kratos did, the fact that Zeus happened to have been his biological sperm donor (which is the only role of fatherhood Zeus played in Kratos' life) when he killed him was basically on nobody's list of shitty things Kratos did.
They did this for two main reasons I can see. First is because this is a father-son game and that helps reinforce some of the themes, particularly the son killing the father bullshit (which isn't actually a cycle, btw. Kratos is the only one who killed his father. Zeus imprisoned Kronos and Kronos (according to myths) imprisoned Ouronus before him, but whatever. I'm just saying, the "cycle" of patricide Kratos is so concerned with involves only him). But more importantly, they focus on Kratos redeeming himself over the sin of killing his father because that sounds bad if you say it in a vacuum, but everyone is aware that Zeus was a murderous, paranoid asshole who was the aggressor in the situation. That puts Kratos' redemption on easy mode. Nobody actually thinks Kratos guilt over killing 'his father' is legitimate. If this was somehow a real life situation, it'd be a tragedy that there would be such a conflict between family members, but no one would question a son killing a murderous father in self defense as somehow the son doing something wrong.
To put this in TLoU terms, imagine if Ellie's guilt and depression were over her remorse at how brutally she hacked apart David, of all people. Imagine a tearful Ellie talking about how she loaths herself because she butchered her crazy pedophile rapist like a pig. Sure, there is a certain amount of PTSD that comes from doing something like that to another human, that might be true, but no one reasonable would argue that this is something that she has any true reason to feel guilty over. He was trying to kill her, she did what she needed to to survive him and did nothing wrong. Fuck David.
And similarly, Zeus was made for players to say "Fuck Zeus!" He was a cartoon villain, his role in the story was entirely to be as much of a bastard as possible so there would be no question of Kratos' rightness to kill him, regardless of how much of a bastard Kratos himself was. The thing that Kratos actually did wrong, in my eyes, is he never took real culpability and responsibility for his selfishness, that he always rationalized any wrong doing as someone else's fault no matter what, that he murdered people who had nothing to do with his vengeance and were simply in his way, that he threw a little girl into a fucking fire because zeus called him a schoolyard insult, and that by the end, the totality of vengeance was, by the way the game frames it, nothing short of a genocide on the entire human race that took hundreds of years to recover from. The most we get with regards to these mistakes is "I killed many who were deserving....and many who were not." but all the flashbacks, the agonizing, even the final word is about how he killed his father. In face of everything, that he killed his daddy dearest amounts to nothing.
Maybe we can get an Abby situation going where someone from the Greek world attacks Kratos over the shit he did.
Also, on a more minor note but still bugs me, if killing of family is some special evil in his eyes that it stands above all the other stuff he did, why is it his father that specifically bothers him? Because in addition to patricide, he also committed matricide, multiple counts of avunculicide, a couple counts of fratricide, and atleast one case of sororicide. Why should Zeus get a special place of regret in Kratos' heart when he killed family that didn't even have anything to do with his vengeance?
They did this for two main reasons I can see. First is because this is a father-son game and that helps reinforce some of the themes, particularly the son killing the father bullshit (which isn't actually a cycle, btw. Kratos is the only one who killed his father. Zeus imprisoned Kronos and Kronos (according to myths) imprisoned Ouronus before him, but whatever. I'm just saying, the "cycle" of patricide Kratos is so concerned with involves only him). But more importantly, they focus on Kratos redeeming himself over the sin of killing his father because that sounds bad if you say it in a vacuum, but everyone is aware that Zeus was a murderous, paranoid asshole who was the aggressor in the situation. That puts Kratos' redemption on easy mode. Nobody actually thinks Kratos guilt over killing 'his father' is legitimate. If this was somehow a real life situation, it'd be a tragedy that there would be such a conflict between family members, but no one would question a son killing a murderous father in self defense as somehow the son doing something wrong.
To put this in TLoU terms, imagine if Ellie's guilt and depression were over her remorse at how brutally she hacked apart David, of all people. Imagine a tearful Ellie talking about how she loaths herself because she butchered her crazy pedophile rapist like a pig. Sure, there is a certain amount of PTSD that comes from doing something like that to another human, that might be true, but no one reasonable would argue that this is something that she has any true reason to feel guilty over. He was trying to kill her, she did what she needed to to survive him and did nothing wrong. Fuck David.
And similarly, Zeus was made for players to say "Fuck Zeus!" He was a cartoon villain, his role in the story was entirely to be as much of a bastard as possible so there would be no question of Kratos' rightness to kill him, regardless of how much of a bastard Kratos himself was. The thing that Kratos actually did wrong, in my eyes, is he never took real culpability and responsibility for his selfishness, that he always rationalized any wrong doing as someone else's fault no matter what, that he murdered people who had nothing to do with his vengeance and were simply in his way, that he threw a little girl into a fucking fire because zeus called him a schoolyard insult, and that by the end, the totality of vengeance was, by the way the game frames it, nothing short of a genocide on the entire human race that took hundreds of years to recover from. The most we get with regards to these mistakes is "I killed many who were deserving....and many who were not." but all the flashbacks, the agonizing, even the final word is about how he killed his father. In face of everything, that he killed his daddy dearest amounts to nothing.
Maybe we can get an Abby situation going where someone from the Greek world attacks Kratos over the shit he did.
Also, on a more minor note but still bugs me, if killing of family is some special evil in his eyes that it stands above all the other stuff he did, why is it his father that specifically bothers him? Because in addition to patricide, he also committed matricide, multiple counts of avunculicide, a couple counts of fratricide, and atleast one case of sororicide. Why should Zeus get a special place of regret in Kratos' heart when he killed family that didn't even have anything to do with his vengeance?
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Killing somebody who did these things to you is not self-defense, it's revenge. And torturing somebody to get information out of them is also not self-defense.
Ellie's violence makes a lot of sense to me and in the same situation I might have reacted in the same way and made the same mistakes, but she is ultimately responsible for all of that bloodshed.
Man I always forget they added gyro-aim. Gotta give it a try
I love that every week I'm finding new content creators to watch. Keep 'em coming
Tofu is pretty entertaining. Good editing skills too. Shame she's taking sooo long to finish it!
I love that every week I'm finding new content creators to watch. Keep 'em coming
Tofu is pretty entertaining. Good editing skills too. Shame she's taking sooo long to finish it!
I mean to be fair, Ellie said she planned on killing Leah, the most innocent of the group. We don't know if she would actually do it though. It's part of Ellie's arc.
Yeah...
Having just completed the game for the first time, and now having read "the internet's" take on the game - it's pretty clear that a huge number of players didn't really have the message land for them.
I was completely shocked to find out that a huge potion of the player base felt betrayed that Joel died lol. "Last of Us 2 is fan fiction". Yikes.
I guess it's difficult for people to have a story that's this heavy and morally grey - which you'd think wouldn't have been an issue for them after Last of Us (1) - where the main character comes to terms with his daughter's death and finds hope and love again - while also damning the human race forever.
A lot of those people never saw the first game as grey and thought Joel was just a badasss cowboy hero that did what he had to do. They didn't look at it from a 3rd person perspective and only saw Joel as a pure hero protagonist.
Which is odd and definitely a shame, yeah.
I can't imagine playing THIS game and trying to dig my heels in about who or what I think is "right" - and THAT's the point that so many people seem to have missed. People are looking for formulaic writing structures and tropes where there are none - just like there wouldn't be in real life. There are no good guys, no bad guys - just....humans.
Fucking fantastic game. I can't stop thinking about it lol.
In TLOU1 Joel literally admits he killed innocent people after the ambush scene...
Exactly the same could be said about Abby. All I read online (including this very thread) about Abby is how cool and much of a hero she is, fanarts, shipping and all the usual fandom paraphernalia . Apparently she's completely fine while Joel is a no no for reasons I have yet to understand.
It comes down to a lot of them just wanting standard games where they play as the clesr hero of the game and kill the baddies.
I've been thinking about it every day for 2 months, lol.
Yep, but "those" people literally ignore it and say "well we never saw it on screen, but we saw what Abbt did to Joel..." even though they don't bring up that we never saw what Abby did in those 4 years...you know, as a direct parallel.
Most people really aren't saying that though outside of some hardcore Abby stans. The common consensus is that all three are just morally grey protagonists that went through emotional trauma and also did some bad shit.
I think some people have a hard time admitting to themself that a character they like or relate to is morally flawed (maybe in fear that it'll reflect badly on them or something) so they kinda whitewash the less pure part of the character.