Kotaku: The Last Of Us Part II’s Violence Is Designed To Be Repulsive

I hope there is a way to avoid excess violence if at all possible. I know telling linear stories is ND's thing but it becomes a concern to me when murder doesn't make any sense to the narrative. I'm currently going through the Uncharted games and I keep running into encounters where I think Drake could easily sneak around some dudes but the game forces the player to massacre waves upon waves of soldiers in order to progress. Dude's like the fucking Terminator.

So if it would make sense for Ellie to sneak past some dudes rather than kill every last living person in the encounter, I hope that's always an option.

I hope what they've shown so far is just the tip of the iceburg with the violence. I want to feel uncomfortable as fuck during some scenes. I want Ellie to become the monster everyone thought Joel was. Fuck my shit up ND.

ASaiyan said:

Okay, but why would I want to be repulsed? If it was one scene or something I could see how they would want to introduce a shock factor and attach meaning to it. But when it's the entire game I really don't see how you can call it "art" anymore - certainly not the mainstream art that was The Last of Us 1, a popular game on the most popular game console in the world. At a certain point it becomes either straight gross-out horror or straight-up torture porn. Or maybe both at the same time. I don't think Naughty Dog have bad intentions in taking this direction but I think it's incredibly misguided personally.

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Shouldn't the types of violence that PII is depicting be inherently repulsive? So, ND are just treating it like that. Buzzfeed recently did an interview with Neil where they spoke about how seriously they're taking it and how they're taking it

So it seems like it's never just, Oh, this is a sweet head kill. You're not making Doom;you're making a narrative that involves violence because the narrative leads that way.

ND: I mean, our aesthetic approach to violence is to make it as grounded and real as possible, and we watch — sometimes uncomfortably — a lot of videos from the world, right? The world that we know, and trying to say, Okay, we don't to make it sexy. How do we make it real? How do we make it uncomfortable because art at times should be uncomfortable? With the story we're trying to tell here, it should at times make you uneasy to move forward, and yet you're so invested in the characters that you are moving forward, and hopefully you're reflecting on the actions that you're taking part in.

Yeah, there's that moment when the woman dips her head below the car and you see her in frame for a second and then you shoot her and her face changes immediately. It goes slack, and the first time I saw that I was like, Whoa, that's a very effective, very small thing. It's just BOOM.

ND: A lot of that— our co–art director John Sweeney, when we did a similar scene like that, we had a lot of gore and stuff shoot out of the back of the head, and the thing he kept fighting was, That's not realistic. Actually it's very subtle and the blood doesn't start pouring until you hit the ground. And there's all these things that make it real and make it more disturbing, and that's really what we want to capture.

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https://www.buzzfeed.com/ericsams/d...ng-team-behind?utm_term=.mgAZlWaRr#.tdN02eyQw

A lot of AAA games depict really horrible types of violence, but it's rarely treated in in a serious manner. Rather than making it repulsive, they try to make it look cool. Like a shotgun blast that sends someone flying across a room or a shot that produces a ton of gore when it really wouldn't (like Neil is describing above). They aren't going down the torture porn route because the whole point of torture porn is to show graphic violence in a very explicit way. That's the "cool" factor with it. That sequence from the PGW trailer would've looked entirely different if it were torture porn. Yara wouldn't have been wearing a long sleeved shirt because they wouldn't wanted you to see her skin being pierced as well as a bone breaking through it. Instead with this game you see her sleeve fill with blood.

Traxus said:

So if it would make sense for Ellie to sneak past some dudes rather than kill every last living person in the encounter, I hope that's always an option.

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While it's not going to always be an option, they've said that you'll definitely be able to sneak through various areas without actually getting into a fight.

TheRedSnifit said:

Pretty unique move to make torture porn fans their target audience. I like it! Take my money ND.

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Hahha! But seriously Last of Us 1 was pretty violent in both cutscenes and gameplay to the point none of part 2's violence even affects me.
Some people seem to be forgetting lots of the things that happen in the first.

People dont want to play the last of us 2 becuz of the blood and gore lol. I have seen worse stuff online. Also when my uncle cut his finger on accident i found the finger and saw him coverd in blood.

Blakhavoc said:

Ppl are so full of shit lol. You don't see this kind of backlash in movies or other video games that have stuff that's just as gory. Just a bunch of folks pretending they were interested in the game to begin with. As far as I'm concerned nothing they're showing is that grotesque, it makes perfect sense in the kind of world they live in.

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To be fair, the gruesome violence in a lot of movies and games is pretty explicitly there for the purpose of satiating the audience's prurient interest in violence and blood. There's not really any confusion about the gory excess in Prototype, Mortal Kombat, Saw, etc. being there to appeal to the depraved fantasies of a certain group - that's why movies in this genre are called "torture porn."

There are plenty of stories like Blood Meridian that have shocking violence without it ever really being appealing, but I don't really see that working in a shooter where killing people by the dozens is your primary way of interacting with the world. So it just makes me roll my eyes when I see ND acting like they're adapting The Road and claiming that we're still going to be "repulsed" by the game's violence after we've brutally dispatched a few hundred faceless grunts.

Shooters are just the worst genre for games that are supposed to have super-serious violence. Fortunately I'm a torture porn fan, day 1 bby.

Honestly, both trailers for this game have been the first time I've seen where the "violence in video games" criticism might be coming from. I'm not concern trolling, I genuinely love the first game and have nothing but respect for Naughty Dog. The realism of the graphics and the humanity present in the characters is reaching a new level here, and it makes this kind of violence extremely disturbing, to the point where the thought of enacting it with the controller gives one pause. The ridiculous controversy about GTA and Manhunt in years past feels so quaint. Those games were completely cartoony. This is something else. The marketing has focused RELENTLESSLY on extreme violence in extreme detail, all of it towards humans rather than zombies.

They're certainly going for something here. I wish them luck in pulling it off. My girlfriend loved watching me play the first game, but she was pretty disturbed by the last trailer. She said it made her feel sick and she wasn't sure she could stomach this game. The decapitation stuff is very disturbing for her, which I understand.

I think it's definitely valid for people to question what's up with the extremity of the violence and the obsessive detailing of it.

He alludes to reference videos. Might be something like best gore or whatever. I swear to god there is nothing worse out there than cartel stuff. And I don't watch these often or at all really, but I've seen a couple and yeah that stuff is crazy crazy crazy these days. Like being flayed alive and stuff. I don't know but this game is probably going to creep me out a bit. These games are getting very realistic.

The Last of Us part 1's violence was already designed to be repulsive, was it not?

It also seemed to me as I played the first game that some of the stuff I, as Joel did, which Ellie witnessed up close, and some of the stuff that directly happened to Ellie, would definitely have an adverse effect on a young, immature mind. I thought that was one of the points that the story of the first game was deliberately going for.

The trailers for part 2 only confirm to me that ND are staying true to the development of Ellie as a character, and to the setting of the world they created.

It's interesting since it's still a video game that lasts tens of hours and you'll be killing hundreds of enemies in (mechanically) satisfying ways so the effects of intended repulsion will disappear over time.

Of course the moments of repulsion towards violence will be strongest in story beats.

If you can't get violence don't buy the game and let developers express their ideas without censorship