The Last of Us Franchise - Because it's apparently a franchise now. This thread has been double-DMCA’d by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

[Titos]

has ND ever really made an objectively good game? even the bandicoot series only really got by because platformers were fucking huge in its time and it was on the playstation, which didn't have much competition there. it was never close to the same level as mario, and everything they've made since uncharted has just been glorified movie games. i guess i have no point of reference for the jak series, so those could be mindblowingly good or whatever.

Voodoo Vince was unironically better than Crash purely due to the OST and Billy Hatcher was better just due to it's gameplay.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Voodoo Vince was unironically better than Crash purely due to the OST and Billy Hatcher was better just due to it's gameplay.

Billy Hatcher was gamecube and Voodoo Vince was xbox, that's a generation ahead of the PS1 and it's after ND had to surrender crash.

It's like saying Panzer Dragoon Saga wasn't as good as Final Fantasy 10.

 

[Titos]

Billy Hatcher was gamecube and Voodoo Vince was xbox, that's a generation ahead of the PS1 and it's after ND had to surrender crash.

It's like saying Panzer Dragoon Saga wasn't as good as Final Fantasy 10.

Final Fantasy was never good and if you like it you're a fag.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Final Fantasy was never good and if you like it you're a fag.

You know what was never good, Magna Carta 1 and 2.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

I generally liked ND's output up until The Last of Us. The first Jak game was my first PS2 game, and I was real young when I played it so I have a lot of nostalgia for it. The Jak sequels were fine, I was never a big fan of them because I felt the first one had more charm to it, but beyond that I find myself revisiting Crash and Uncharted every few years. Crash 1 and 2 are two of my favorite platformers ever, and Uncharted was always a stand-out series for me and was, in my eyes, one of the big reasons to own a PS3. I can definitely understand why people don't like Uncharted because it did lead to the unfortunate "cinematic gaming" cancer that's spread throughout the current game industry, but Uncharted never took itself too seriously; it was about emulating summer blockbusters than shitty art cinema, and for their time they were technologically impressive. As someone who dislikes cinematic gaming, I give Uncharted a pass because at the very least it's focused on spectacle and blow-out action setpieces than tedious walking sections where people do nothing but talk. I even started replaying Uncharted 1 and it's night and day from TLOU 2; it's more concerned with having fun than making everyone miserable.

Really, I think TLOU 1 was the first Naughty Dog game I genuinely didn't like because it wasn't fun. It traded Uncharted's explosions for slow, boring, unskippable walking sequences. I never cared much for the story or characters either so the game's slow pacing drove me away from it.

 

[Titos]

You know what was never good, Magna Carta 1 and 2.

Don't even know what that is but it's probably some gay shit seeing as it's named after something made by Brits and a brief search says it's some kinda asian game made by someone not named Itagaki, Swery, or Capcom.

 

[Homer Simpson]

The Woke-Off continued on Twitter yesterday, as ND's favorite critic made a comment and Troy Baker got triggered.

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tweet / archive / tweet / archive

Imagine being someone who gets paid to write about video games. Now imagine you hate the customer, and the product. Now imagine that you aren't even good at it and want everything to be movie length because don't want to actually spend your time doing your job. That's who these people are. Gamergate should've never happened because these people should've never existed in the first place.

 

[Sekirodiealot]

 

[Rotollo]

Gamergate should've never happened because these people should've never existed in the first place.

Nah, as long as film schools get way too many applicants the graduates will have to get their money's worth somehow.

 

[Son of Sparda 84]

Trying the game out right now. Ironically the Twitter troglodytes who say the people hate the game are homophobes when to me the best part of the game right now are Ellie and Dina interactions

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

You keep posting in the thread but you don't seem to have actually read it. Nobody said this game was going to flop, everyone was saying it's in fact impossible for it to flop on a large scale because it's a sequel to a 20-million seller.

The big question is, given the pedigree of its predecessor and the gigantic budget it had, what exactly is the threshhold it needs to cover for Sony to be happy with it? The vast majority of big companies always want bigger sales than the previous title, and there is no way that is going to happen here.

The ramifications of the extreme disdain and backlash this game has received won't be clear for years to come. It does seem like The Last of Us is dead for the future after how hated this game has become and it's a big question mark what the future of even Naughty Dog will be going forward.

The game selling 4 million copies its first weekend was never in doubt or disputed by anyone. We all knew this game would have very high sales, especially in the beginning, and the narrative that this leak somehow helped the game is completely incomprehensible. You can't just say something like that without explaining how you imagine this leak helped the game in any way, because all it did was start a massive meme-train and have people desperately hoping the leaks weren't true.

As for the success or failure of the game, that's not something we can know right now because that all depends on how much money went into it and how much money was expected to come back to them. We know it had an insanely high budget and that expectations were high. We can also suspect that it won't have anywhere near the legs (long-term sales) as the first game did, though this remains to be seen. Sony's expectations versus the actual sales is all that will matter for the people who developed this game, and while 4 million is a very large number for any game, it's guaranteed to be much below what Sony want to see from it.

Much as was seen with the Star Wars films and Mass Effect 3/Andromeda, you can't judge a failure in a franchise like this which has reached "too big to fail status" on the bad entry itself. It all comes down to what'll happen with the next entry, that's where people will be nope'ing out if they hated the last one. It'll be interesting to see where it ends up and what happens to Naughty Dog in the next few years.

Beyond the commercial issues that spring from people buying the game and hating it, there’s also the interindustry complications. Was there ever proper confirmation for Naughty Dog having to bring in Hollywood techs to get the game out? Game developers aren’t usually that hard to replace. How screwed is their repution when they can’r get people in when the western industry is already well known for being a meat grinder.

 

[Belvedere]

I have a profound distaste for Abby's design. Not necessarily because of the character itself, but because its underlying implications.

Naughty dog could easily have altered the model a little to hint at a female bodyshape. No drastic change had to be made to attain a middleground that makes anatomical sense. An inch off that impossibly thick torso; an added inch of width to turn her male pelvis into a female one; B-cups instead of those nonsensically masculine pecs. None of that would have compromised the intent behind the character, nor sexualized her in any way.

Considering that anatomy is a cornerstone of character design, I find it exceedingly unlikely that no one would have brought up those problems in seven years. Thus, it has to be that the over-virilization of Abby was an established requirement in her design brief. Perhaps to make her as physically unattractive to the audience as possible, or perhaps to drive home that she's just a warped reflection of Joel. A new, comically uncreative twist on the bald spacemarine archetype.

Whatever the justification, this trend of purposefully eschewing attractive physical traits for the sake of "telling a story" really is a microcosm of everything wrong with western videogames. Developers are afraid to contend with sexual appeal, so much so that they seem to adhere to a school of thought that says gritty realism equals either ugly or painfully average. A thought so ludicrously immature it instantly explains the absolute lack of writing chops in this part of the industry.

No need to overthink this. Abby was purposefully made as unattractive and unappealing as possible as a massive "Fuck You!" to heterosexual men. We have to remember that this game was influenced by hack feminists Anita Sarkessian and her ideological mentor Laura Mulvey who spouted the whole bullshit concept of the "Male Gaze" as some sort of patriarchal oppression. Abby looks the way she looks because Druckmann is a male feminist that hates heterosexual men so much that he created a female character that would cause nothing but utter revulsion to said men, nevermind that it is the same demographic that make up most of the video game playing audience.

In Druckmann's mind Abby is a strike against the patriarchy or some bullshit concept of the sort. Also, what better way to discourage the creation of porn of the game than making the female characters as repulsively unfuckable as possible. (Unless you are Niel Druckmann, who used his position to motioncap his self insert fucking Abby because of course the creepy male feminist ally would do such a thing )

 

[Gamepad]

Beyond the commercial issues that spring from people buying the game and hating it, there’s also the interindustry complications. Was there ever proper confirmation for Naughty Dog having to bring in Hollywood techs to get the game out? Game developers aren’t usually that hard to replace. How screwed is their repution when they can’r get people in when the western industry is already well known for being a meat grinder.

The only crossover I can think of is artists, especially animators. Otherwise, the Hollywood people wouldn't be working on real-time systems like in game development.

Devs are hard to replace, artists aren't.

It's fairly common for artists to be on contracts unlike the rest, on top of some companies going through them like copy paper. The only other type that gets about the same kind of treatment is QA testers due to being fairly bottom of the barrel in terms of hiring pool. Ironically, the higher level QC tester has more stability than an artist on average.

 

[Homer Simpson]

Nah, as long as film schools get way too many applicants the graduates will have to get their money's worth somehow.

How many of them actually went to school for anything like that? I think most are just rejects that jump into whatever field they can.

 

[Personal Jesus]

No need to overthink this. Abby was purposefully made as unattractive and unappealing as possible as a massive "Fuck You!" to heterosexual men. We have to remember that this game was influenced by hack feminists Anita Sarkessian and her ideological mentor Laura Mulvey who spouted the whole bullshit concept of the "Male Gaze" as some sort of patriarchal oppression. Abby looks the way she looks because Druckmann is a male feminist that hates heterosexual men so much that he created a female character that would cause nothing but utter revulsion to said men, nevermind that it is the same demographic that make up most of the video game playing audience.

In Druckmann's mind Abby is a strike against the patriarchy or some bullshit concept of the sort. Also, what better way to discourage the creation of porn of the game than making the female characters as repulsively unfuckable as possible. (Unless you are Niel Druckmann, who used his position to motioncap his self insert fucking Abby because of course the creepy male feminist ally would do such a thing )

Not even young, 14 yo Ellie escaped the uglification process, for some reason:

 

[Sekirodiealot]

Not even young, 14 yo Ellie escaped the uglification process, for some reason:
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But muh realism

 

[Dom Cruise]

No need to overthink this. Abby was purposefully made as unattractive and unappealing as possible as a massive "Fuck You!" to heterosexual men. We have to remember that this game was influenced by hack feminists Anita Sarkeesian and her ideological mentor Laura Mulvey who spouted the whole bullshit concept of the "Male Gaze" as some sort of patriarchal oppression. Abby looks the way she looks because Druckmann is a male feminist that hates heterosexual men so much that he created a female character that would cause nothing but utter revulsion to said men, nevermind that it is the same demographic that make up most of the video game playing audience.

In Druckmann's mind Abby is a strike against the patriarchy or some bullshit concept of the sort. Also, what better way to discourage the creation of porn of the game than making the female characters as repulsively unfuckable as possible. (Unless you are Niel Druckmann, who used his position to motioncap his self insert fucking Abby because of course the creepy male feminist ally would do such a thing )

Not even young, 14 yo Ellie escaped the uglification process, for some reason:
View attachment 1417027

It's utterly insane that this is where we're at now, that female characters in games are being designed to be as hideous as possible out of spite.

I used to look at Ellie in the first Last of Us as a good example of a good middle ground for female characters in games, she was not a sex object, but she was cute and a well done, well rounded character, if that was the direction female characters in games took I would have been more ok with it.

But now we get utter abominations like Abby.

Even I did not expect things to get to this point.

 

[Fluoxetine Man]

Not even young, 14 yo Ellie escaped the uglification process, for some reason:
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Is it SJW 'realism' or Naughty Dog covering their ass from Ellen Page's fivehead?

Here's another meme

 

[Doctor Placebo]

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Spoiler: Noi vs Abby sperging, slightly NSFW

Noi is the one on the left with her jacket open and no shirt underneath. Notice anything that sets her apart from Abby?

Yeah, she has rather prominent tits, not a slab-like pair of man pecks.

I guess she packs them down pretty good when her jacket is closed, because they tend to kind of disappear. But since both characters expose themselves to one degree or another, we clearly see the difference. Noi also has a sort of Samus Aran thing going where she wears a mask and gets mistaken for a guy a lot when she's covered up, so there's a reason for her design.

She also exists in this weird high tech dystopian ultraviolent setting with magic, and is a sorcerer, not a wasteland with about the same tech level as now and scarce resources. So the idea that she might be artificially roided up on any number of things, technological or magical, is a lot more believable.

TL;DR- While she is a muscle chick with some masculine features, Noi is still significantly more feminine looking than Abby, and her appearance is more justified by the setting she's in.

And there's that personality issue, which this soyboy brushes off. A character not being a massively unlikable cunt counts for a lot, and makes people view them more favorably, including their physical appearance.

 

[Sekirodiealot]

One more i saw