- Joined
- Jun 15, 2014
Something that occurred to me is that a lot of people in this thread point out that TLOU 2 lets Abby go scot-free and the player has absolutely no say in how it plays out. Thing is, there is a way to do that right. I recently played The Witcher 2, and at the climax of the game, the antagonist, Letho tells you his reasons for doing the things he did throughout the game, and it's revealed that he's not really a bad guy, just someone caught in a bad situation. Not to mention he actively helped Geralt's love interest out of respect for Geralt (both of them depending on your choices).
At this point you can either fight him to the death or you can let him go. You'll find that a lot of people preferred to let him go because they sympathized with him and felt that killing him would have been pointless after everything was said and done. But you can also kill him because he did assist in bringing about war (albeit not by his choice) and because it was his actions that caused Geralt to be in the same mess.
The key difference here isn't just that the player has the option of either killing or sparing Letho, it's also that Letho's a charismatic, well-written character to the point that it's a legitimately difficult choice. In essence, he is the complete opposite of Abby. Had Abby been written better and had she been likable on any conceivable level, I don't think people would have had a problem with Ellie letting her go. At least then, the themes of revenge might have had more impact since it'd be between two characters you grew to like constantly at each others throats for reasons they aren't able to justify.
Of course this would also require the entire game to be rewritten because it's thoroughly impossible to like Abby based solely on her actions.
Horizon Zero Dawn has a similar thing, though with significantly less emphasis - right when you start the "Proving" you meet a guy who has a Focus (basically Google Glass except not shit) and he's flighty as hell, dodging your questions. Later, after the Proving goes to shit because of cultists with machine guns killing most of the people there, you discover the guy was working with the cultists and seemingly marked Alloy (the player character) for death because she weirdly resembles this other woman who Alloy has never seen before.
Eventually you get to the town this dude lives in and find out where to track his ass down and kill him in the name of justice...but it also turns out he knows what he did to the point he can't sleep at night, and he did it unwillingly as the cultists have his wife and child hostage. The next mission is to actually confront him, where you do and he eagerly volunteers a lot of plot relevant detail about the cultists. Notably, he explicitly states that he isn't going to beg for his life - he knows what he did and understands if Alloy judges his life forfeit, all he asks is that she save his family from the cultists. If you don't kill him, Alloy still makes it clear that the dude has a lot to answer for and that by showing mercy, she expects him to dedicate his life to righting his wrongs - and then instructs him to meet her at some location so the first thing he'll do is help Alloy save his family from the cultists.
With Abby, I feel like it was a double whammy from the start - you have it where she's a serial killer just murdering people named Joel and she basically draws out the death of an old guy (who saved her life no less) with absolutely no remorse for her actions. If they'd simply removed the whole serial killer thing and then had her kill Joel with a single shot to the chest (especially given I bet Joel didn't take as long to kill her father), it would go a LONG way in making the character actually seem more like a person who saw a moment of opportunity to right a wrong, instead of just trivializing WHY she kills him in favor of just making Abby a murderous psychopath.