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The Last of Us 2


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1 hour ago, chakkman said:

What I always find funny in such discussions is that it's always about nazis though. If you take a look at Russia's history, then you'll see that Stalin not only murdered a lot more people than Hitler did, but also that the Russians don't hold their heads in shame for the rest of their lives, or get nearly as much attention, or a display of evil for the times in which Stalin reigned. It's most interesting that humans always seem to focus on one specific thing, while leaving the rest, which may be much more severe aside. I still have to figure out what's the psychology behind that. Maybe I'll find out one day. ;)

Not to talk about other countries, of course. China, Vietnam, America, England, Spain, Italy, Portugal... they all have dark times in their history. Yet almost noone ever speaks about those. Again, maybe I'll find out one day why people are so focus on one single thing. One single evil, one single hero. Pretty one dimensional.

That's generalization and whataboutism. There's a strong nationalistic movement in Russia trying to rewrite history, both on authority levels but down to nationalist student circles and common folk, who still think Russia can rise to be a great nation again and Putin will do that. That's why all the war atrocities are and will be swept under the rug. Other eastern countries have their history heavily censored, like China; but you can find some of that in documentaries or modern Chinese literature, usually by those who fled abroad. Nazis are only brought to light so often because it's probably the best researched and most accessible kind of knowledge; but that doesn't automatically mean that history of other countries isn't discussed or preserved.

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12 hours ago, peter_spy said:

I choose not to buy any Rockstar Game from now on, because I don't want to hear about some guy doing overtime work just to make the horses' balls shrink during in-game cold weather.

That level of love for detail made games like Gothic 1 and 2 or Arx Fatalis such a long-lasting and good experience though.
I really miss that in most "modern" games.

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21 hours ago, peter_spy said:

But one obvious and easily missed area here is a personal choice. I choose not to buy any Rockstar Game from now on, because I don't want to hear about some guy doing overtime work just to make the horses' balls shrink during in-game cold weather. I don't want people working on Mortal Kombat get PTSD. I don't want to make manchildren developers think they're deep and good at mature themes, the way they did it in TLoU2. So I don't buy these products.

That's fine. You're talking about personally choosing to avoid a company because of the way that company behaves towards their employees, or because you think the product is low quality. This is something people do all the time, for their own personal reasons. Some people don't like to buy from Amazon because of reports of how they treat their staff, or because they put smaller vendors out of business. I don't choose to read clickbait garbage articles by the woke media for the same reason: I am not interested in putting (ad) money in these people's pockets, and their content has no value to me.

But this is a completely different issue to what I was talking about, which is the demand to ban content because of the personal views or behaviour of individual content creators, based on a silly superstitious idea that viewing content somehow spreads political views like a virus. Guilt by association is a fallacy, and media effects theory has been repeatedly debunked (although is still sadly believed by many people it seems).

21 hours ago, peter_spy said:

Does it make me a hypocrite, because I still buy everyday things made in Chinese sweathsops?

No, but that was never my point. It's not about being a hypocrite, it's about the complete impossibility of operating a "all content creators must have clean political opinions" policy, given the vast number of content creators who contribute to modern culture and the impracticality of trying to keep track of all of their personal views.

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14 hours ago, chakkman said:

And what is the connection between space rockets and nazi inventions? I still don't see it.

The V-2 rocket was both the first object to be propelled into space and the first major usage of a liquid-fueled rocket engine, so there is a direct lineage from this weapon to the liquid-fueled rockets of today.

This is the only connection between Nazis and space rockets and you're right, it's completely irrelevant at this point in time. If the Nazis hadn't invented this rocket, somebody else would have. But that's exactly the point. We don't demand that space rockets be uninvented and memory-holed because of this historical connection to the Nazis. So why are people demanding that this guilt-by-association approach be applied to other cultural artifacts?

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A generalist argument is not inherently flawed. Without generalizations it's impossible to understand abstractions of this historic mess with borders that we label "nations". Especially in Europe.

Almost every country in our region has some dictator who is still revered as a hero - Joseph Pilsudski in Poland, Bros Tito for Yugoslavia, Antonescu in Romania, Ataturk in Turkey and others. Pointing out that politicians spilled blood, had racist policies, pursued policies of irredentism is not an act of rewriting history. History was always written by the victors.

The only universal truth about any country in the world is that they hold a monopoly on legally applying force against its citizens. So, whenever abuse happens, this needs to be researched and exposed, to prevent it in the future.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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8 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

By mentioning Pilsudski along Titos and Antonescu you actually prove the point on how badly misguided a generalization can be.

Not at all. People/dictators that gained power by force never brought anything good. Their methods become an endless perpetuation of violence that leads to even more suffering. Tit for tat is a knee jerk impulse that cannot be admissible for serious peace efforts. The only countries that win in this field are the superpowers that have more resources/force.

Edited by Anderson

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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I can only guess these are your general conclusions. While there's no doubt that Pilsudski is a controversial figure, he stands nowhere near the rest you mentioned. It's whole orders of magnitude of a difference. I'm not a historian, but I've yet to hear a comparison like that made by historians, and being respected as a sort of consensus / canonical reception.

Btw. I think we went way too offtopic for this one. And one more thing I wanted to address:

59 minutes ago, OrbWeaver said:

demand to ban content because of the personal views or behaviour of individual content creators

Yeah, that needs more careful evaluation than just straight banning. It's easier when the content is the problem. If it still makes for a historic / valuable piece, this usually just needs a sort of introductory commentary. When it's one or multiple authors having extreme political views, it's more like a personal choice, I guess. Not that TLoU2 asks for banning or something like that. It's more that the whole conversation around the game is a bit silly.

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14 hours ago, peter_spy said:

That's generalization and whataboutism. There's a strong nationalistic movement in Russia trying to rewrite history, both on authority levels but down to nationalist student circles and common folk, who still think Russia can rise to be a great nation again and Putin will do that. That's why all the war atrocities are and will be swept under the rug. 

Dunno. It rather appears to me that they have a more healthy way of dealing with their own history. It is not healthy to erase everything former generations did from your mind, from your country's traditions, from the law book, basically from everywhere. In Germany, the word "race" will soon be removed from the consitution. How much sense does that make when you are referring to racial discrimination at the same time? Just because the bazis had the raciology, which existed way before them, BTW.

Talking about sweeping things under the rug. I find it much more healthy to learn from your mistakes, than to simply erase them, remove them, pretend they were never there in the first place. That is the fool's way of dealing with them, and the fool will never learn that way. Actually, the fool repeats the same mistakes, because, that's basically censorship, and not standing up to mistakes.

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46 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

I can only guess these are your general conclusions. While there's no doubt that Pilsudski is a controversial figure, he stands nowhere near the rest you mentioned. It's whole orders of magnitude of a difference. I'm not a historian, but I've yet to hear a comparison like that made by historians, and being respected as a sort of consensus / canonical reception.

 

It's more of an enumeration regarding a common way of acting/modus operandi. The names are not so relevant. It can be Pilsudski, Bandera, Franko or Pinochet. Means justify ends. It's ok to sacrifice a few small people for the great idea. In fact, they must be killed. When the advantage comes, there's no way around it. It's what Jeremy Bentham wrote about in respect of utilitarianism.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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5 minutes ago, Anderson said:

It's more of an enumeration regarding a common way of acting/modus operandi. The names are not so relevant.

 

This is a very simplistic 'couch philosopher / historian' kind of view, but fortunately it's none of what scientists or historians do.

16 minutes ago, chakkman said:

Dunno. It rather appears to me that they have a more healthy way of dealing with their own history.

Are you serious? They're actively erasing evidence and destroy memorials of war atrocities, NKWD crimes, etc. None of this is even close to healthy. You can check people who try to preserve the past there and have serious problems with it because of the authorities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)

Last such attempt was made in May this year in Tver, it's just one of many cases where the record of crimes by Stalin's regime is being erased, despite numerous evidence.

Not that I'm anywhere near competent to speak about these matters in detail, but you guys have some serious knowledge problems here, and any generalization doesn't really help.

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32 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

 

 

This is a very simplistic 'couch philosopher / historian' kind of view, but fortunately it's none of what scientists or historians do.

 

Ignoring the rule of law is as much couch philosophising as pretending that people aren't buying Ph.D's and plagiarizing left and right in former communist countries. Of course the committee that reviews those Ph.D's are good buddies with the government and they encourage another patriot no bs historian who will teach those neo marxists who's the boss in this country.

32 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

Are you serious? They're actively erasing evidence and destroy memorials of war atrocities, NKWD crimes, etc. None of this is even close to healthy. You can check people who try to preserve the past there and have serious problems with it because of the authorities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)

Last such attempt was made in May this year in Tver, it's just one of many cases where the record of crimes by Stalin's regime is being erased, despite numerous evidence.

Not that I'm anywhere near competent to speak about these matters in detail, but you guys have some serious knowledge problems here, and any generalization doesn't really help.

Nobody denies that I think. They are also masters at exploiting the insecurities of each country's peoples, pitting them against each other. They experience the same nationalistic ideology that Poland and Hungary is atm.

Edited by Anderson

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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12 minutes ago, Anderson said:

Ignoring the rule of law is as much couch philosophy as buying Ph.D's and plagiarizing in former communist countries. Of course the committee that reviews those Ph.D's are good buddies with the government and they encourage another patriot no bs historian who will teach those neo marxists who's the boss in this country.

You know that when someone says that you're simplifying something, you try to be more precise, and not come up with yet another set of non-sequiturs or surface-level remarks? This is a waste of my time, sorry.

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2 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

You know that when someone says that you're simplifying something, you try to be more precise, and not come up with yet another set of non-sequiturs or surface-level remarks? This is a waste of my time, sorry.

So is cherry picking non-issues.

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"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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I've always found it amusing that a de facto interactive movie game, where the bad guys are either literal mushroom-zombies or your standard issue "tough post-apocalyptic survivors who 'did what it took to survive, rawr' and are now engaged in typical heartless post-apoc tough-guy buffoonery" villain types, is having any sort of pretentions to artistic and social profundity. Sure, games are art and all that, but a zombie game wouldn't be my first choice of game to search for this sort of profundity. Also, if someone is desperate enough to market their game by intentionally provoking potential controversies well in advance (poking the predictably behaving usual suspects, who go berserk at certain topics), then I'm afraid it might not be much of a game to begin with.

TLoU no. 2 exists for a simple reason: The first game was quite popular, made a good deal of money, so they made another one. If you ask me, they didn't have that many places to go, considering the story of the first game (what I know of it), but they did it anyway, because it pays the bills and publishers care about banknotes first, good reviews second, and artistic integrity... maybe somewhere at place 412th.

Kojima's Death Stranding, as silly and pretentious and goofily creative as it was, felt to me a bit closer to actually examining the negative and positive impulses that tend to guide human beings, for better or worse, than the Last of Us' n-millionth examination of the "Hey, zombies appeared, the world has gone to crap, and aren't humans now uniformly horrible and selfish, even if it's illogical ?" idea. Death Stranding felt like it has something more to say about humans and their complexities than the rote old messages paying lipservice to Thomas Hobbes. Ironically, DS has the far darker, far more insane setting, and it still felt like it's telling a more interesting story about loss, suffering, the lies we potentially tell ourselves, and the divisions and misunderstandings we create, or how we become prisoners to our own egos (if we're not careful). Creepy setting with some off-beat, rather silly worldbuilding, but I felt the game's narrative had its heart in the right place in a lot of both serious and amusing ways. I can respect that, even without thinking the game's some masterpiece. In contrast, zombies and post-apocalyptic assholery has been done to death, especially in the last decade alone. That alone makes this IMHO forced sequel to an okay but not really exceptional game feel already... well, dated.

At least Death Stranding, somewhat like Thief, encourages you to avoid violence and killing if you can, rather than reward it. If all TLoU does to examine human frailty, physical, emotional and mental, in a world riven by catastrophe, is to have players smashing heads in, "making tough decisions who to kill or not kill" and then contemplating its navel about human nature, it doesn't really bring much new to the table. Every single zombie-themed game or work has done that, a million times over. It's almost as clichéd in games and other works as "you're a muscle-bound, grizzled space marine, so tough you shave yourself with a blowtorch, go kick alien/demon/evil corporation ass" being the basis for the whole premise and plot. It just... isn't novel. Not even in a reinvented way. If TLoU didn't have mushroom-zombies as its one claim to originality, then it would be basically like any other zombie work where the undead have collapsed the entirety of society and now everyone's an asshole to each other, because God forbid humans would actually think and cooperate, rather than try to murder each other for silly and petty reasons 100 % of the time. The whole "crazy nihilist warlords who stifle any attempt at rebuilding civilization and bringing human decency" plotting is as clichéd an idea as zombies, space marines, "tough moral choices" (that aren't, or are only false dichotomies), and I could go on. Yeah, there's nothing new under the sun, even Thief pilfered from film noir, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, The Name of the Rose, Thieves' World, and who knows what else, but there's more to making an original game or other artistic work, than just changing a few details, adding pointless trends ("press this to crack open a defenceless person's skull while doing overblown moves; press this to have characters lecture you with wannabe edgy profundity for over fifteen minutes straight, in a blandly staged cutscene") and throwing huge production values at everything. Inevitably, many of these will feel dated sooner or later.

Any well-written game will leave you with something interesting to think about not because it told you "Here comes the profound bit, pay attention !", but because it executed its storytelling both verbally and non-verbally (visually, through audio, written content, etc.) in such a manner that it left you with stuff to ponder. Even if it didn't give you all the answers, but it also didn't chicken out by not giving you any either. We want a good game script/story to stimulate us in ways that might be uncomfortable and unusual, but not necessarily cynical and trite, and that have some added value, including in things like humour and levity. I think a lot of the most artistically accomplished games actually don't shy away from humour. Smart, maybe even cute humour, rather than the "I'm an edgy cynic who uses edgy ironic statements" school of thought. I could write hours upon hours on these topics, but I'll cut it short here.

You know, with all this silliness around TLoU 2 and other zombie games and post-apocalyptic games, I'm tempted to write a script for a little indie adventure game with a more introspective story. The world is back to normal, but there was some standard issue zombie catastrophe a few years back. In it, your main character (either a guy or a lady, depends on the player's choice) was forced to fight and then kill a friend they really liked, because whatever caused things to go bananas and turn people into ISO standard zombies also affected their friend. They grappled with trying to just defend themselves, tried to capture their friend, then get help and find ways on how to save him or her. They didn't want to kill a good friend, as any decent human wouldn't want to, even if they had the impression their friend might be beyond help at that point. Unfortunately, something happened, the friend got lose, the protagonist was forced to kill them. The friend was killed, but rather than go "Yeah ! Got another one !", the protagonist understandably mourned that they've lost a good friend to such horrible circumstances. The vast majority of the game is set in the present, there's no zombie-killing, scavenging for resources, nothing. The world has gone back to normal, society's generally like before the mysterious catastrophe (you could reveal at the very end that it was some alien goo from a meteor or something similarly silly), but people are still emotionally and mentally scarred from the experience. Our protagonist is trying to cope with the fact they didn't kill some mindless monster, but their unlucky friend. They're trying to find a way forward, within themselves, also via counselling, and they might be thinking about finding a therapy group or similar group of equally affected people. Just to share their story, to cope with others, maybe even find new friends and bond over that awful experience they're trying to overcome.

There's your profound, more psychological zombie game. Not the n-millionth "who do we kill or be killed" and "survival of the fittest" nonsense that the prepper-crowd jerks off to. Also, why set it in the US, always the US ? Because markets ? Maybe our story happened in France. Or Kenya. Or Chile. Or South Korea. Or Estonia. You can be plenty more creative than making slightly different variations on "Gun-toting Prepper Simulator 2020: When the Zombies Come, They Ain't Gonna Git Me !", LOL. :P

P.S. If the first game was about the last of them, then who the hell is still running around in the sequel ? I hope this doesn't become some endless series like Assassin's Creed or Final Fantasy, otherwise the TLoU series' title will become increasingly inaccurate, just like the title of the Final Fantasy series. I am actually kind of disappointed TLoU is a series now, to begin with. One game, leave it at that. It ain't no sin, developers and publishers...

Edited by Petike the Taffer
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On 7/26/2020 at 3:03 PM, Petike the Taffer said:

TLoU no. 2 exists for a simple reason: The first game was quite popular

Sort of, yeah. I finished my session with it lately, and I mostly stand by my initial opinion. In similar vein to other AAA colossi, it's a game with gorgeous graphics and lighting, as well as very detailed animation, but with very low standards in all other departments. I can only guess that someday this will be compared to David Cage's work, who'd really like to make movies, but don't want to be judged by criteria applied to the art of cinematography (as both the audience and critics would just trash everything he ever did).

The pacing, the dialogue, the narrative structure, the whole buildup and the outcome, it's all fairly cheap, annoying and subpar. I can see the ambition, but it's backed up mostly by technical skills (graphics, camera movement), not by being educated in literature, cinema, or general culture canon (script, dialogue, pacing, editing). It kind of exists in its own bubble, and it uses very extreme emotional situations to manipulate the audience to think this is serious approach to the subject matter. I know I felt manipulated, but it still was cheap. Like waving a set of rattles in front of a baby: Hey, here's your super violent moment! Exciting, huh? And now, super deep empathy moment! And now scoffing teenager dialogue!, Etc., etc., ad nauseam. And with no character development whatsoever.  All the consequences come only slightly at the end, in the form of PTSD flashbacks, but that's mostly it.

So while I know what the fuss was about now, I hope it wouldn't be regarded as something profound in games, because if so, then this really is a bubble with low standards and only remote connection to reality (cultural and otherwise).

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  • 1 month later...

So, I finally also got to play TLOU2. The game had its moments, but I don't know, it kind of left me sitting here unsatisfied.

Spoiler

The whole part after the farm feels out of place and rushed, as if it wasn't even planned in the first place, but then they decided the ending was too nice, so they added the Santa Barbara part, or something like that. The only thing really good about Santa Barbara was the final fight vs Abby, which was just so primal, raw and intense. I think it would have been even more intense, if you could actually recognise her as Abby visually, which I really couldn't, even after comparing the models in the gallery.

I also felt like the mid-game switch-over to Abby was a huge bummer for at least 4 to 6 hours. Of course, eventually she growed on you, but those 4 to 6 hours still greatly impacted my overall enjoyment of the game. I mean, the TLOU games are mostly driven by emotion and if you don't like the character you play, there is not much left to enjoy.

So yeah, part 2 doesn't even come close to part 1 for me. It was an intense experience, but I wouldn't repeat it.

Does my opinion concur with the content of this thread? I didn't read it because I am too late to the party (for fear of spoilers)! :D

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