TLOU2 Review Thread
- Thread starter Phoenixmgs
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Naughty Dog games sure tend to end up as critical darlings. Never really saw what the big deal is, honestly. Not that they aren't very polished and sophisticated, and shit, but they also feel very basic to me. They are competent third person shooters mostly built around memorable set piece moments, suffering, in my opinion, from their highly derivative narratives and visual languages barely salvaged by competent character writing. Now, to be fair, I'm a dogmatist who believes that everyone who makes a piece of media set after a Zombie Apocalypse in this day and age should be sent right back to the drawing board until he can come up with something more inventive, but come on. Anyway, another critical success for Naughty Dog. See you in two or three years for Uncharted 5.
These guys to me fall on the other end of the game journalism spectrum. Not mainstream, so give off the impression of being more “like us gamers”. But the problem is they’re still biased, and glossed over a lot of details the game gets right in regards to everything from audio-visual details to new gameplay mechanics. Hell, Rurikhan didn’t even mention the new boat or the fact that Ellie can swim, climb and rope swing around for traversal now, along with the core combat mechanical improvements over the last game. If those improvements are “so minor” to Skill Up for example, then idk what you could consider being “major” without literally changing the game genre.
Skill Up also especially states right off the bat that the story was the biggest factor for his disappointment and not recommending it; Rurikhan also said it was tough to recommend, and then they both have several people in the comments are already saying thanks for saving them $60 just based off some biased shit they said.
The only way people are going to know for themselves is simply playing the damn thing themselves. Unless people don’t even want to be bothered thinking for themselves anymore.
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I don't care if it's fair, I don't want these morons on my front page. Whenever I see a video thumbnail with big yellow font I know to check the channel first before actually clicking the video. If they have The Quartering, or Clownfish, or Yellowflash in their featured channels... yeah, fuck them. And if it has 'destroys' in all caps I know to ignore it completely.
And yet I highly doubt the majority of the hate is due to Naughty Dog's dismal treament of its developers, otherwise where was all the hate leveled at Red Dead Redemption 2 (or 1 for that matter). People got disturblingly hateful toward this game when the third trailer hit, when nothing about worker treament or bad story leaks were known. And they got hateful because gay in videogame. A front and centre gay kiss. Even with what happens in this game, people wouldn't be half as mad if the person commiting it wasn't apparently trans (although that seems to be disputed now). It's not getting the amount of hate because it's misery porn, it's not getting hate because Naughty Dog has shitty crunch culture, it's getting hate because gayness is apparently being pushed because certain characters are gay and *gasp* even trans. It's getting so weird people are even making shit up to get mad about, like how Amy Henning apparently wrote TLoU and that Neil Druckmann stole her work.
And hey, remember when Persona 5 had that weird caveat that you weren't allowed to stream it or do a let's play passed a certain point, as deemed by Atlas? Where was the collective shitfit and hatred toward Atlas on that occasion? This was when the game was fucking out in stores.
Even without the embargo I doubt many major review sites would mention it since it's supposed to be a big twist. It's not a game breaking progression blocker that reviewers would fail to mention, it's a story beat that's supposed to take audiences by sursprise. No review mentioned the big twist in God of War neither.
Their weird obsession with "SJW's" ruining entertainment. It's embarressing at best and fucking toxic at worse.
In regards to this, I remember there WAS in fact backlash to that fact.
Yeah, but it was minor at best. More of a 'well, that's just Atlas.' When the Persona 5 reviews came in very positive people weren't calling it into question due to Atlas' behaviour.
Probably because dark and edgy is kinda the norm in video games while hopeful story are the quirky alternative. I suppose its a little better then it once was but the game industry still kinda struggles with the idea that things must be dark to be mature.
yeah, that's usually on the western side of the things. The Japanese had made that same mistake too, but not to the extreme extent the West does.
I fully get what the gameplay of TLOU2 is going to be like; I've played the main Uncharted games and TLOU, and I've seen enough gameplay from TLOU2 to see the differences. Naughty Dog makes at best just good 3rd-person shooting mechanics that are extremely polished for what they are. From that video, it looks like the game doesn't remember what shoulder you last shot off of just like every one of their games (outside of UC4 IIRC). And, I'm pretty sure the game has an automatic cover system, which I hate. I've already committed to playing Desperados 3 that comes out 3 days before TLOU2 because it's the much better stealth game.
I don't go by Metacritic at all as most of the games that have scores in the mid-90s or higher, I probably wouldn't even rate half of them as better than 5/10.
Yeah, I was basically assuming that with regards to UC4 or that Neil got big enough after TLOU to have the power to take the helm or a bit of both. I didn't even realize that Bruce Straley was on UC2 until I looked up his credits before posting and saw that he was director on the 2 Naughty Dog games that I really liked.
Well, if 25 hours is going to be an average playthrough length, TLOU2 is 66% longer than TLOU1 (where HowLongToBeat says is 15 hours long).
I got enough of opinions on the story from Rurikhan and Skillup honestly. Rurikhan said he liked 60% of the story and disliked 40% and Skillup said there's major plot issues and character consistency issues. It's not like this should really be surprising, does anyone not remember Uncharted 3? I'm sure there will be "spoiler" reviews like what's done with movies so you can know the very specifics on why so and so didn't like the story much vs the much more vague critiques.
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Everyone is biased, I don't get what the point of calling a review bias is. Regardless of who the reviewer is, I want their completely honest opinion of something, which I feel these 2 guys do give, and I feel Jim Sterling does as well (even though his and my tastes are pretty different, I respect him for being honest). I pretty damn sure the boat gameplay isn't going to make TLOU2 much better if at all and too much of it could easily become annoying. I definitely was never looking forward to more boating in GOW4. At best, it can be used as a pacing mechanism providing some character moments between 2 characters during some downtime. From Skillup's review, it seems like you hardly need any of the new transversal mechanics and instead of making those ladder, box, and platform "puzzles" better, Naughty Dog just basically took them out for the most part. I feel both of the reviews showed video of the rope at least. It's not like you can use the rope like you could in UC4.
I think most everyone knows what the gameplay is going to be if they've ever played a Naughty Dog game in like the last 15 years. The only thing the reviews of TLOU2 have done for me was that I probably moved this game slightly down in priority on my list of games to play; I was already getting Desperados 3 over TLOU2. For a Naughty Dog game to really work for me, it has to be firing on all cylinders because the gameplay alone isn't anything must-play; the pacing, the setpieces, and the characters/story all have to be well-executed and I'm getting the feeling that they just weren't in TLOU2. Only really UC2 and TLOU have accomplished that in past Naughty Dog games so they have a higher miss rate than hit rate.
Oh god, The Quartering is so bad I couldn't even get through one of his videos.
What's wrong with those featured channels? Sound like pretty inoffensive pop culture stuff to me.
More or less sounds like the practical upshot is that if you're desensitised to strong bloody violence you'll probably enjoy it, and if you're not it'll probably be a depressing slog.
They're part of the neo-Mcarthyist tradition that sees left wing ideology and the death of culture everywhere, particularly in things which feature women and minorities.
Aren't they more like reactionaries balancing out the neo-mcarthyists who see racism or sexism everywhere, particularly in things which feature or are liked by straight white men?
I don't think being against SJWs is the same as being against left-wing ideology btw. People can be for social programs and general left wing economic policy but just take an issue with the cultural elements therein.
I've actually found that this has taken quite a backseat this generation. You look at most AAA games, certainly from Sony, and they're pretty chill. Even God of War has mellowed out and found a sense of humor. The only games that seemed to have really pushed for 'maturity through torture porn' this generation were MGS5: Ground Zeroes and apparently TLoU2.
Which is why they need to make a video everytime an "SJW" sneezes. Seriously, how many videos have these "reactionaries" made about Anita Sarkeesian, or She-Ra, or 'Get woke, go broke'? Like, hundreds?
Oh hey, guess who's already made videos about how the reviews of TLoU2 are bullshit/questionable... Gee, I wonder why they did that for TLoU2 and not for Death Stranding or the ending to FF7R, which were very controversial as well.
You're comparing apples and oranges here, one is a game making weird politically-influenced choices based on the views of the creators, the other is just games going in a certain way that has narrative concerns arise from some fans based on their subjective tastes.
The latter is a subjective matter of opinion and reasonable people can disagree about those games being objectively objectionable or not so it's not quite as cut and dry to support a video being made about it. The key difference being that it's fine if games are being games first and not agents of progress or messengers of a political idea first. There's nothing controversial about a game just being bad in some way or having an unpopular element. That's within the boundaries of expected game content. Meanwhile lord Ania was trying to use gaming to promote feminism and make herself money and fame and was using games as a tool, a means to an end, to achieve this. All the while feigning interest in them as she did this. There's hundreds of videos worth of debunking right there haha.
I do remember the quartering at least making videos about ffviii censoring Siren and Tifa's new redesign too so they're not ignoring these games completely either.