No more pallet puzzles: THE LAST OF US PART II

in part v you are a crafting bench.

in part vi you are a an environmental artist at naughty dog, crafting a series of tiny environemtal psychodramas about survivors at the end of things. you are forced into working a series of 14-hour shifts and 7-day weeks via less and less soft pressure; if the player stops playing, their real world credit rating will slowly decline. pressing L2 opens an inventory wheel in which you find a memo from management, telling you they anticipate your adjusting to "the naughty dog way of doing things", and a picture of your daughter. you do not see your daughter.

Ok so some initial gameplay thoughts.

Combat is fun and polished, with more depth than cover shooters, and more forgiveness than stealth shooters when you got spotted. For a long while this is what sustained me.

Rat King LOL OMG WTF. I knew that this was going to be something horrible, especially since its level is a very clear echo of the hotel basement he in Part 1, but the pure fear it inspires is on a different level, since you have actually have to engage with this big boy rather than make a mad dash for the exit. Is beating this thing what people feel when they beat a boss in From Soft games?

The Ellie boss fight otoh was quite a lot harder, and by how frustrated I got, she was the hardest boss of the game. I didn't upgrade Abby's listen mode much (mostly because you don't even have listen mode on Grounded in Part 1 and I have/had aspirations of beating Part 2 on the hardest difficulty), so as often as the Rat King ripped me apart, Ellie shivved me probably twice as many times.

I thought Santa Barbara was going to be a quick epilogue! So I kept powering through it because I thought the end was just around the corner.

Semi automatic guns are a tease! I never unlocked that ability for Abby's rifle because Rat King aside, when will you even have the ammo to unload on enemies, much less fight enemies that can soak up that kind of damage?

Oops, not initial obviously!

Two really great set pieces too: the on be where Jesse drives and you shoot infected and Wolves, and the one where you ride through the burning Seraphite village.

When I read criticisms that the end game is pointless, I thought they meant that it was nihilist and that Ellie was on an inevitable path of killing Abby (am end which I approached with dread), when those same criticisms were in fact voiced because they *wanted* that to happen.

check out this maniac

The Last of Us 2 photo mode tips & tricks thread:

Let's start with a simple portrait. This particular room/spot has a nice, soft, bloomy light. Finding good lights & shadows make about 95% of your shot. This thread can hopefully help you with the remaining 5%.

01/20 pic.twitter.com/FZwRW86yU8

— Petri Levälahti (@Berduu) July 5, 2020

that's awesome

Something that for me worked exceptionally was how the emotional/ethical peril is treated as equally as the physical peril. I was fighting against Ellie in the final showdown even as I played as her, and I was on the edge of my seat until she decided to let Abby live.

At the farmhouse when Ellie is preparing to go, and like, I love this game and want to keep playing it, on the other hand, Ellie wtf is wrong with you, hate you right now, don’t want to be you

Also: wow they did Yara dirty

Beat it.

It will be immense on “hard” when I come back to this in a year or two. (I think there are slightly too many materials available on normal mode.)

I imagine the final Santa Barbara hacienda shoot-out ought to be a bit better of a send-off on hard, too.

I feel bad about not using the flamethrower more.

When you come back to the aquarium as Abby and find the dead dog is one of the great “oh, fuck” moments in any videogame.

Incredible game.

I think there are slightly too many materials available on normal mode.

Yeah, I was actually kind of pissed that I was maxed out on resources and had to leave loot behind.

I'm kind of toying with the thought of replaying on Survivor, which is almost definitely overly ambitious.

Also OMG at the banner image here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastOfUs2/

So what about the annoying things in this game?

- You get to use the flamethrower like twice
- You get to use the silenced submachine gun for the last scene only
- On 'normal' you never have to worry about health or supplies
- Big resource drops spoiling the tension of upcoming confrontations
- Proximity bombs never needed. In fact, you rarely need to do much more than switch between silenced weapons, long-range weapons and the shotgun. Maybe this is different on hard/survivor - you actually have to plan your attacks and how you're going to switch up the damage you deal?
- Easy finale in Santa Barbara
- THEY DID YARA DIRTY I mean honest to fuck. Yara is like the whole thing for Abby. Yara's what inspires her to go rogue. She risks her life to pay Yara back. Now I'm not saying Yara shouldn't have bitten it, fine, that's an artistic choice. But after it happens, not one scene of Lev grieving for her? For the sister who saved his life again and again? Not one scene where Abby remembers her? I know, they have to escape, but what about after that?

JFC: https://kotaku.com/new-the-last-of-us-part-ii-trophies-tease-grounded-mode-1844678713

Who are these people who think this game isn't hard enough?

Permadeath is an insane option

It’s not quite hard enough on “normal” thi though, as documented in this thread

I thought it was, but ok, for argument's sake, sure - there's already a million adjustable difficulty options to make the game that much harder

Yeah - for me the sweet spot was making resources a bit more scarce.

God knows how I'd ever beat the section where you're escaping from the house with Lev and Yara on the other side of the door if all the difficulties were ramped up including enemy damage etc

oh man, this game

just watched a playthrough. I could not play this game; too violent and scary to actually inhabit the controller & feel all those deaths, and I definitely tabbed through a lot of the puzzle / assault sequences. but being able to tab through -- well, I definitely get the crossover hype / interest in non-gamers, this is a form of narrative more effective than anything television is capable of right now. this game totally takes advantage of 70 years of art film vocabulary like Tarkovsky / Rivette / Akerman and flips it all back over into Romero mainstream narrative storytelling

still a lot to figure out, but yeah, cried twice

Did you play the first one Milton?

skimmed the first 35 minutes of a playthrough. yikes!

only three games I've actually played myself in the last 30 years are Katamari Damacy, Journey, Monument Valley. I don't like holding the controller for first person shooters, but certainly have seen friends playing things like Bioshock etc as the games slowly evolved into whatever this is

Haha, you and I are the same gaming program. Although I did get sucked into one of the Far Cry ones (I think it was 3?)

I started NG+ on Survivor, mainly because I want to get all the collectibles AND also use the item pinging option.

blog it for us Leee

Well here's a start:

Got to the first infected house as Ellie and kind of just noped the hell out -- the thought of getting the mechanics of stealthing and down infected rn seemed a little more daunting, especially as I try to re-acclimate to the combat on a higher difficulty level!

(This all after I kept eaten alive in that Abbie prologue in the snow; in the end, I killed one runner and then just ran away from the ones that I could. I expect this will be a familiar refrain.)

WELL. I can’t just creep up behind clickers anymore on Survivor, as anything faster than the slowest crawl will alert them.

I looked at the trophy list and goddamn it but Grounded and Permadeath are both part of the platinum.

Sorry, platinum claim is a lie: https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/the-last-of-us-2-all-trophies-and-how-to-get-the-platinum#dig-two-graves

permadeath in a game like this is absurd!

TBF you can enable it on any difficulty, so if I'm in an extra masochistic mood and decide I want to try a Permadeath run, I'll probably do it on the easiest difficulty.

Also, I'm clearly sneaking up on the clickers wrong: https://youtu.be/qCV4ivXi190?t=5206

I might have to reload an autosave (hopefully) because I had to clear that section with 6 bullets.

I've been thinking a little about the shape of the narrative as it relates to empathy, namely how as you approach Abby and Ellie's confrontation, the amount of empathy the player has for each character is a mirror image. We start off liking Ellie, but over her Seattle section, she does more and more to lose that empathy; when we play Abby in Seattle, it's the exact opposite, but we grow to empathize with her the more we play her.

Finished this last night. Goddamn it.

Based on some of the clickbait-y online discourse I was really worried the story was going to be misery porn. Thankfully it isn’t—it’s heavy and sad and even mildly upsetting at times but it is earned. I was constantly taken aback by the quality of the acting and how much the performances carry the story, even through the weaker parts.

Gameplay-wise it felt almost identical to the first but I was pretty cool with that. Graphics obv were amazing.

Things I didn’t care for:

-The Seraphite cult was a little undersketched and kinda corny. Loved Lev though, he was cool.

-While I wouldn’t quite call them afterthought, the infected could have had a bigger presence in the game. As a monster lover I really wanted more variety in their types. That said, the infected coming out of the walls and the big blobby Thing-like hospital basement monster were pretty gnarly.

Overall pretty fantastic game.

welp
https://www.vulture.com/2020/11/the-last-of-us-show-hbo.html

I'll probably watch it someday. I'd prefer if it came up with an original set of characters and story, but I doubt they're gonna go that way

ahh the lure of “original IP”

man what an experience. i'm trying to retain some critical faculty and say it had the storytelling quality already common to contemporary fiction or season-length tv, but something about the identification-thru-control of video games adds a much more direct connection in terms of pathos. i was frequently very impressed and more often moved than i have been by, idk, HBO in a long time

i followed the culture war skirmishes of its release only passively but in retrospect it's maddening. sure you had lots of plainly bigoted resistance -- queerness and (uh oh) Gender Trouble is front and center thru the entire story. but there was plainly a ton of snarling anguish at being made to feel something people didn't want to feel.

the worst you can say about the story thematically is that it's hypocritical. like are you really giving me an extended meditation on the warped produce of violence while i'm pulling off so many sick headshots. the worst thing you can say about that gameplay is that it's Cabinet Scrounging Simulator 2020.

i think it pulled off a modernist tragedy. the double revengers arc doesn't complete either way, it's just laid down too late. neither heroine is able to make herself understood to the other. more than just a thwarted crowd-pleasing "rivals teaming up at the finale." ellie doesn't make the final boat trip to catalina herself, maybe to give to the fireflies what joel prevented (though i think it's hinted that mel was abby's father's intellectual heir; so much for that)

i just realized looking at this thread title that there is one (1) pallet in part II and it's a gag

did you ever figure out a slick way to deal with the dogs? they probably gave me more anxiety than anything else in the game.

cry and retry?

not really. pick off the handler from afar, after that the dogs just kind of wander in place

https://kotaku.com/senior-couple-was-having-trouble-with-tlou2-he-answere-1847996198

OK, I just dipped in for a few minutes. My first reaction was, wow, does this game look good. My second was the legit emotions that washed over me, which really underscores how incredible the first game really is. It's immediately such a bittersweet reunion, and I can only imagine things don't get sunnier. Thankfully, I've somehow managed to remain spoiler free, but that inevitably means it's going to be an extra wrenching run.

yeah you have no idea :/

word

I'm barely into it, but I called down my wife to check out the early snow scenes. She was impressed, and said "just looking at this makes me cold."

She asked me if a video game has ever made me cry, and I said totally, at their best they are just as effective as movies and books or whatever. The beginning of "Ori" is up there with the beginning of "Up."

Man, the weight of this game ... things got really dark and shocking and mean pretty quickly, even for "The Last of Us."

The technical achievements of this game alone are kind of mind blowing. But most impressive, even early on (I'm in Seattle) are all the details that they just didn't have to stick in but did, not just foliage or tiny remnants of the "old" world but character moments as well. Ellie was at the music store with Dina, and there's that moment with the A-ha song where I realized, huh, they had to pay the rights for this song and write and animate this whole sweet sequence, but the section is not only totally skippable (afaict), I could easily imagine some folks missing it entirely on the way to the next properly scripted story moment.

Game's really ramping up. Just hit the TV station and tunnel sequences. It does a great job nudging you toward different strategies/approaches, like using bricks or bombs not just to take out WLF but to attract clickers to them. Def. pretty brutal. I assume (hope?) it evolves into more than just a vengeance quest, but if it doesn't the scenery alone should suffice.

It's pretty amazing this was made for the PS4, though I guess the likes of God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn did a pretty good job showcasing that system, too. TLOU2 was I guess optimized for the PS5, but I think it was just limited to a better frame rate, which really underscores the current generation's place (at least for now) as a sort of PS4 Pro Pro.

The birthday side trip to the science museum was predictably touching. It's the quiet moments that really made the first game, and they seem to be a highlight of the second as well, though I do sense that the story is set to shift.

Was just reading some fan/internet thoughts on the show, and ... yeah, they're pretty mixed at best, and often similar to my thoughts. I think this show has made some inexplicable mistakes (most notably revealing Abby's backstory/impetus early and neutralizing any suspenseful/mysterious "why?" element) that do nothing but hinder the story. And whether or not the show is telling a different story or telling that story differently, then ... what story *is* it trying to tell? Because we only have two episodes left, and at least one looks like it will be flashback and the last will likely be the confrontation between Ellie and Abby, but if you told me the show was about the cycle of violence or Ellie's descent into empty-soul rage, this show is absolutely not doing that, or at least not well, which is one reason, say, the confrontation with Nora came off more mechanical in the show than it does in the game, where iirc it was one of the first major disturbing "why are you making me do this?" player moments.

I really can't figure out *why* the show is going wrong in this way, given Druckmann's involvement and Mazin's respect for the source material. All I can think of is that Druckmann is doing his best to remain hands off and hand the reigns to Mazin, or maybe he's totally checked out after so much time spent so close to the material (or distracted by work on the new game). Or maybe Mazin (who, as a reminder, was credited with almost nothing but shit before "Chernobyl") is either not up for the task or, maybe more likely, so set on proving himself an auteur that he is awkwardly reshaping the story into something it's not, or can't be? And Druckmann, maybe intrigued by the changes, has convinced himself that they are smart, or ... I dunno. Just kind of frustrating to see it fall so short of the games.* It's like we've all digested a complete director's cut masterpiece but are now being retroactively delivered a rough draft.

*(as good as much of the show often still is!)

the show is a kidz bop version of the game

I don't think it's that bad, because it's pretty gruesome and gritty at times (we just saw a guy lynched and eviscerated), but it's still pulling its punches, emotionally and narratively. Playing it too safe, speeding through story beats without letting them breathe or, more importantly, build.

Saw this discussion on reddit (I know...) that helped key in a bit more on what doesn't seem right about this season and/or show:

https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastofus/comments/1kobqd7/why_is_show_ellie_stupid/

OK, now this is interesting. I thought this new episode was good, but also mostly because it's really faithful to the game, with a few exceptions (in the form of additions). I did notice at the very beginning of the ep the *three* writing credits: Mazin, Druckmann and ... Hailey Gross, who of course co-wrote the second game. At first I thought, oh, they gave her credit *because* so much of this episode is drawn directly from the game, but then I thought, no, this wasn't a "based on" or "adapted from" sort of credit, I think she's just a really good writer and better at adapting the game to TV than Mazin. Like, the Joel childhood backstory or Eugene? I bet that was Mazin. But Gross was the real MVP and I see she's also credited on next week's season finale, which is promising.

Anyway, this episode underscores what's been off with the rest. It takes its time, it lets characters think and stew, it's not in a hurry to get to some action sequence, and so on. It still says out loud too many things that could have been more subtle, but hey, it's TV. Something I am very curious about is that if next week is indeed the inevitable Ellie/Abby confrontation in the theatre, then next *season*, S3, will be focused largely on Abby's journey, with I assume bits of Ellie and Dina at the farm in there. That's going to be a pretty big shift for the show, and maybe even *less* successful if they try to speed though it. My suspicion, something hinted at by the runners, is that the Part 2 adaptation will indeed need and get another season.

OK, now this is interesting. I thought this new episode was good, but also mostly because it's really faithful to the game

ok you lost me.

this was the first ep i didn't finish and honestly i'm not in any hurry to pick it back up. the only faithful part was the birthday scene which in the game is one of the highlights and even that was given the backseat to more of this non-canon "character development" rewriting/reimagining that is on par with Dick Tremayne/James&Evelyn/Windham Earle in terms of steep S2 drop-offs.

maybe i should finish the ep before i disparage your "really faithful" claim tho 😅

Ha. I mean, much of the episode - the visit to the museum, the porch scene - was pretty close to the game equivalent, and didn't add too much BS, and those two scenes are what people will take away from the ep. A lot of other stuff was more unnecessary - the Joel origin story with Tony Dalton, the scene with Joey Pants - but at least they were well acted, so I had no problem with them as an episode. Now, I do think putting the porch scene here, as much as I understand why they did it (putting it at the end, as it is in the game, would meaning making game-casual viewers literally wait years for the flashback) was a mistake, which robs it of power/impact. It also does the thing I think I noted above, changing things from the game to no appreciable narrative benefit, because now they have to find a new way to end the show, which I saw Druckmann concede in an interview.

Also saw a interview with Mazin that makes me think he is truly full of shit. In it he claims he was shocked no one online seemed to take issue with Dina and Joel going to the lodge, not Tommy and Joel, but tons of people did. Same with postponing Dina and Ellie's relationship, which was also pointless and also throws off the rhythm of the story.

But yeah, long story short, I liked this episode, did what it had to do even if I wasn't 100% on board with how/when it did it. And no matter how I feel about specific episodes, I'm really bummed that this season is making the same mistakes as the first, but bigger and more (negatively) impactful. I wonder if any of it plays poorly for those unfamilair with the game? Maybe.

I think this season is proving Mazin to be a hack who got lucky with Chernobyl more than the right director to realize this vision. Watching this season does nothing more than make me want to play the game again, which I probably will now (just bought the PS5 upgrade for $10).

play it on grounded 🙏

proving Mazin to be a hack who got lucky with Chernobyl

not lucky enough to not get locked out of the edit room on Chernobyl due to his behaviour during production

tbf it did leave him free time to try to get elected to VP of the WGA so he could union-bust it from the inside

Oh wtf?!!!

I would agree that Mazin maybe lucky, except that Druckmann is also involved here and so is, on a couple of episodes, Halley Gross. So how, with the game and its story and its look and its characters all right there, they kind of bobbled the ball in this way ... I just don't get it. Everything is rushed, changes made have not generally been for the better and, for that matter, even when they don't make things worse don't add much, either. I just ... I dunno. The episodes are too short, cutting out too much good stuff, and there are too few of them, forcing more rushing. The production design, the cast in general, it's all making this better than it could have been, but I'm still pretty bummed. There's only so much they can do to make up for scripts that seem to have been shaved down to their bare minimum when the story and characters deserve so much more. Makes me want to play the game again, which is so good that I suspect I would feel just as strongly about it the second time as I did the first.

Also, piggybacking off the ILE thread where I guess maybe my comments have not been welcome, I have no problem with changes, but they should be for a good reason, and imo the changes being made here have not always been for good reasons, especially when the changes made seem to undercut the themes of the game. So, sure, you can change things, but if you're going to mess around enough with the game just because you can, then why even tell the same story, or largely the same story? I think there is room for all the stuff they've done, they've just done it at the expense of what they should have focused on first. (Again, imo.) That is, Bill and Frank in the first season, there's nothing wrong with that episode other than that its run time and budget comes at the expense of other stuff that might have made the season better, as good as that episode might have been. Same with Melanie Lynskey in S1, whose character added up to nothing, or Gail and Eugene in this season, who largely served to emphasize or make explicit ideas that were already implicit. And there's nothing wrong with Bella Ramsey, per se, just that she doesn't seem to be quite good enough to improve the not good enough material or character development being handed to her, as opposed to Merced, who lights up here scenes.

So, again, back to the other thread. Sure, people comparing things to the game might seem annoying, but ... it's an adaptation of the game! So it's fair game, so to speak, imo. But also, the problems people seem to be having with this season in particular ... it's largely *because* of those changes!!

OTM. I think the Gail and Eugene bits were added to replace the flashback scene where Ellie goes back to SLC and listens to the tape recording. They needed a mechanism in place for Ellie to know for sure what Joel had done. In that sense I get it, but it's not as powerful as Ellie going to the scene of the crime and seeing what Joel did herself as she did in the game, but in this case I bet it was budget that led to this narrative change.

Two other changes in the finale bugged the hell out of me which I felt totally detracted from the story, and there are some interesting, if extremely unsatisfying, answers from the show runners. First, Ellie's visit to the Seraphite Island - this felt like some rushed, cheap mechanism to attempt to dumb-splain an audience where the WLF was attacking that night. Here's Druckman's explanation:

Neil Druckmann: I will, just to add to that, because, you know, sometimes in adding something that was cut from the game requires you to remove something that was in the game. So, here that sequence where Ellie like drifts to the Seraphite Island and almost gets lynched herself was something we used to have in the game and cut it for just production pacing purposes. And then now- now we had like three horrible things in a row, we had like that sequence, Alice and then Mel. And in our conversation, we're like this, probably one, one too many.

Perhaps it was cut from the game for a reason? You know ... production pacing? Which its addition in the show mars? That whole day 3 approach to the aquarium was just perfect in the game as is. There was no need for such a side quest! So what did they cut then to balance? Alice, the other change that really had me scratching my head. Here's the justification for that from Mazin:

“In the game, when Ellie arrives in the aquarium, a dog attacks her and she stabs it to death, and we don’t know this dog,” said Mazin. “I won’t get into what happens later, because there’s referring to what’s next season, but we had a situation where a number of horrible things were happening. Plus, because it’s live action, the nature of violence becomes much more graphic. It’s more graphic because it’s not like there’s an animation between you and it, it’s people, and it’s very disturbing. We knew what was going to happen to Mel was disturbing, and to Owen, and also what had just happened to Ellie was disturbing.

I felt Alice and the gruesome and ruthless nature of Owen and Mel's deaths really highlighted how dark Ellie had truly become, and really amplifies these moments' importance after you go through Abby's perspective and build empathy for them. Ellie's actions and ruthlessness mirror Abby perfectly, and I feel the show is trying to maintain a semblance of moral superiority or "innocence" within Ellie here that not only feels off with the story, but even at odds with the character as portrayed by Bella Ramsey.

Ultimately this post is just repeatedly underlying your point, Josh, in that the changes made seem to undercut the themes of the game.

It's like they took out some of "the juice". Alas.

That's the bummer of it all. The fundamentals of the game are still there, they've just been ... weakened or watered down, I guess. Which is the prerogative of any adaptation, but then why adapt something if you are going to denature it? This show feels sort of like one of those awkward or wayward director's cuts of a movie, a new version that fundamentally changes things by putting stuff back in but also takes important stuff out. I feel like it would benefit greatly from the "Lord of the Rings" extended version treatment, longer and with more details and character beats and moments that made the source material what it is. Gail and Eugene, Bill and Frank, that sort of stuff is what should have been *added* to an extended cut, which could have made the story even better.

I do like Kaitlyn Dever a lot, and look forward to watching her in S3, but after this season I may have changed my mind and no longer see how they can do four seasons without focusing on a bunch of War in Seattle BS, though the overlapping nature of the story implies that, yes, we're going to get that epic island battle between the Wolves and the Scars. So are we going to get the Santa Barbara epilogue? Probably. Are we going to get Ellie and Dina at the farm? Probably. But have they depicted Ellie as a relentless revenge machine to the degree that would drive her to the game's final conflict. Imo no, and that was the failure of this season and maybe the crux of it all: how do you make your lead protagonist an unlikeable monster? There was no avoiding doing that for Abby, but Ellie's poor choices this season have been depicted as products of immaturity, or impatience, or, less generously, ignorance, yet in the game she knows exactly what she is doing.

From the AVClub review:

Which isn’t to say that I needed this finale to wrap up everything in a nice, neat bow. But I did want it to deliver a sense of thematic finality—to clarify the emotional beginning, middle, and end of the season, even if there’s still more plot to unspool. “What has Ellie’s revenge mission wrought?” could have been a powerful emotional button if this episode had lingered on the tragedy of Jesse’s death. “How has Seattle changed Ellie and Dina?” could have been another, if Isabela Merced weren’t so weirdly sidelined this week.

But “What did a character we don’t really know do for the last three days?” is basically at the bottom of the list of things I care about right now—the sort of hook that only exists because this show is adapted from pre-existing source material and needs to get ahead of fan explainers that would spoil that structural twist in the long gap between seasons. A good cliffhanger leaves you wanting more. This one just kind of made me shrug, especially because we already know much more about Abby’s motivations than gamers did when the POV shift happened.

HBO’s “The Last of Us” Season 2 finale aired to half the audience that tuned into the Season 1 finale of the video game adaptation, as Sunday’s season closer saw 3.7 million cross-platform viewers. That’s down 55% from the Season 1 finale, which scored 8.2 million cross-platform viewers, then an impressive feat given that it aired opposite the Oscars.

Season 2 premiered to 5.3 million cross-platform viewers.

HBO cautions that “The Last of Us” Season 2 finale viewership is expected to grow due to low tune-ins on the holiday weekend, and stressed that the franchise overall has seen 90 million viewers since Season 1 ended. Season 2 is tallying nearly 37 million global viewers per episode.

Ellie's poor choices this season have been depicted as products of immaturity, or impatience, or, less generously, ignorance, yet in the game she knows exactly what she is doing.

Couldn't have said it better myself

https://i.imgur.com/NZirtHu.png

💀💀💀

No one bit on the ILE thread, but Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross have suddenly both left the show. I know they are all pretty busy with other projects, but it's not a good sign when the two writers of the Last of Us 2 game suddenly leave the show midway through telling the Last of Us 2 story.

Eh, the show was already a bit meh, if it gets lamer so be it. Likely better that Druckmann and Gross focus on what they do best.

Well that's for sure; the show has always been a sidenote. Lotta little rumors that Last of Us 3 is in development, which was maybe inevitable (rumors and game), but if they are going to do it for sure now is the time to get going on it. That's one explanation for why Gross left as well, given she has far fewer management commitments than Druckmann does (I presume).

lol

The Last of Us Part II Remastered Chronological Experience update out today

"The free update lets players experience Ellie and Abby’s story chronologically and also includes unlockable skins and trophies."

Nathan/Sam Drake skins included in No Returnhttps://t.co/7QALDe1LNi pic.twitter.com/xQrV2aRhKO

— Wario64 (@Wario64) July 8, 2025

Latest red flag: now HBO is suggesting there may be just one more season, airing in 2027. They really screwed this up, lol. It's not like they were riffing on George Martin's napkin-scribble outline or whatever, it was all right there! It's like they spent all this time and effort on the sets and then pared the story down to its barest minimum and even then rushed through the material they had. As some other nerd noted, "Lost" was maybe an average of 20 episodes *a year*. "X-Files," too. "Game of Thrones" (as far as more recent bigger budget epic HBO fantasy goes) was 10 episodes a year for 8 seasons. The Last of Us, despite having (unlike those other TV shows) a complete start to finish narrative, is going to wind up maybe, what, maybe 25 episode total over the span of four years? And that's with all the extra stuff they added to the game/story.