No more pallet puzzles: THE LAST OF US PART II

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.

https://media.giphy.com/media/UrsOTbx6xh20IXChwR/giphy.gif

Ah I didn't realize they're offering an upgrade option -- I thought they were making people buy the new version by itself.

(As for the Ragnarok DLC, yes on both counts.)

The timing of this seems strange, doesn't it? You've got a hit TV show that just announced the cast of its in-progress second season, and *now* is when you drop the Part 2 remaster? It's all but asking people to catch up (and get spoiled) before S2 airs.

Nah, better than waiting even longer. I'm sure this delayed whatever the heck they're working on for the end of the PS5/beginning of PS6 era

I think it's probably the opposite, no? They wasted a bunch of time on the Last of Us multiplayer that got the plug pulled, and this remaster is a stopgap to make some money with a roguelite mode tossed in.

You're right about the abandoned MP, but it seemed inevitable there was going to be a "remaster" of Part II for PS5, or least of a new coat of paint (like the first one) so might they might as well just drop it

I did notice that they are selling this remaster for $10 less than Part 1. Granted, Part 1 was a ground-up remake, but it's nice they're not going strictly cash-grab. Or maybe they kinda are? I could have sworn I bought Last of Us 2 new a couple of years ago for less than $20, maybe ... $10?

the trailer for the remaster looks fucking incredible

Digital Foundry, a bunch of nerds, did a comparison of this and the PS4 version and iirc noticed next to no visual improvements, fwiw. But I think that's largely because this was an incredible looking/playing game from the start. From what I've read (I downloaded the upgrade but won't get to it for a long while, assuming I ever do, lol), the biggest/newest additions are slightly faster loading times, the commentary, (eventually, as DLC) a great looking documentary , the roguelite mode and cool haptics. Oh, and tons of new accessibility settings. Oh, and a couple of apparently fine but incomplete unreleased sections.

For $50 I would scoff but for $10, sure

It's a $10 upgrade if you already own it, but $50 if you are buying it for the first time, which I believe is a price *increase*, at least compared to what it's been sold for over the past few years, let alone secondary. That's kind of eh but to be expected, I suppose, because I really do think Naughty Dog needs to fill the coffers. They are likely years away from any new game.

I loved TLOU2 (top 5 all-time for me) but the roguelike mode doesn't sound like my kind of thing, and I watched YouTube videos of the unreleased sections (the commentary from the game makers is pretty interesting! They put a LOT more thought into seemingly small details than you might think.), so I'll pass on the $10 upgrade (which, imo, seems like a totally reasonable price). And people have noted that you can save a few bucks by getting a PS4 disc then getting the $10 upgrade, instead of paying the full PS5 retail price. A year ago when I bought the PS4 disc, new copies were plentiful at $20.

Also, re: timing of this upgrade release, maybe they are cleaning their plate so that they have full resources available to work on Part 3 (I hope)?

They've been coy about it. I think Druckmann said he had a loose idea for a part 3 but that's it. Meanwhile there have been rumors about a new IP - fantasy of sci-fi? - which I assume is in progress. And maybe I heard they were working on more than one thing? I might be thinking of From. But given Naughty Dog shed a ton of staff when the Last of Us multiplayer got cancelled I doubt they're anywhere near ready to dive right back into that world. This remaster seems to me a pretty clear stopgap.

From what I've heard they're working on two new IPs, one fairly active across multiple teams, the other pretty early going - still being conceptualized, and neither are related to The Last of Us. Would be surprised if either of these see the light of day before 2025.

I'm not even sure TLOU3 will make it to this generation, though you'd expect it to be an end-of-system PS5 title, I think the pandemic probably pushed all their giant multi-year plans up

New doc dropped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC3C7GMMfDU

Apparently there is a passing reference to a potential third installment.

Just watched this, it's pretty solid. The connection the cast and creators feel to each other and to the characters (especially Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson) is palpable. The doc apparently stopped filming when covid hit, so the last bit was filmed in 2023, and there's some remarkable stuff where they recount the impact of all the shit surrounding the game, from the infamous leaks to the release, resulting in everything from death threats on down (people even threatened the family of the person that plays Abby). Druckmann notes the irony that the Dutch person that leaked tons of hacked footage was ultimately just a fan, the proverbial young guy living with his parents, who thought leaking the gameplay would force Naughty Dog's hand into finally releasing the game, which had been indefinitely postponed by the pandemic. Druckmann and others interviewed were clearly brought down to their knees with disappointment, but they all seem to be in a much better place now.

On a slightly different note, I admit I am a total pushpver, but it's been a while since I've seen some of the LOU2 clips included in the doc, and boy, did they immediately dredge up dark things I felt while playing the game.

people even threatened the family of the person that plays Abby

More to the point, they threatened her 2-year-old child.

Head and sub-head are great: https://kotaku.com/last-us-tv-show-season-2-pedro-pascal-joel-hbo-1851366131

lol!

lol

Walkback: https://www.ign.com/articles/pedro-pascal-isnt-done-filming-the-last-of-us-season-2-after-all-hbo-says

Gotta do some guitar playing.