Did it "flop" though? Not that I am defending the game, but I thought it had healthy sales. People bought it because they liked the first game. A good franchise can coast off it's earlier popularity even after getting woke. Basically spending the fan credit they banked.
e.g. Mass Effect 3 was a disaster, but that didn't truly show through until Andromeda.
ME3 was ok until the last 5 minutes just blew out any and all effort put in by the players across 3 entire games. With the added multiplayer mode you could even get enough rewards from there to buff your war campaign points that missing entire chunks of the story rewards wouldn't matter because you still passed the thresholds for the better endings where whatever happened wasn't quite as bad. The Destroy ending for example could either simply wipe out the Reapers and other AI at best, or incinerate the surface of Earth as well at worst killing countless humans and others because the method wasn't working as best as it could.
At that point though it's literally the end of the trilogy so the only ones who can avoid that are those who never played it in the first place and are told by others. TLOU pulled its switch around halfway through the game, so much earlier and susceptible to backlacsh significantly sooner.
I'm amazed that more people didn't consider the story was trash with the intro of ME2. They ignored the consul believing in the reapers than killed Shepard for a time skip. They made the story about fighting bug monsters in a main plot that made no sense unless you already read the script. I could go on and on and on
Did it "flop" though? Not that I am defending the game, but I thought it had healthy sales. People bought it because they liked the first game. A good franchise can coast off it's earlier popularity even after getting woke. Basically spending the fan credit they banked.
e.g. Mass Effect 3 was a disaster, but that didn't truly show through until Andromeda.
ME3 was ok until the last 5 minutes just blew out any and all effort put in by the players across 3 entire games. With the added multiplayer mode you could even get enough rewards from there to buff your war campaign points that missing entire chunks of the story rewards wouldn't matter because you still passed the thresholds for the better endings where whatever happened wasn't quite as bad. The Destroy ending for example could either simply wipe out the Reapers and other AI at best, or incinerate the surface of Earth as well at worst killing countless humans and others because the method wasn't working as best as it could.
At that point though it's literally the end of the trilogy so the only ones who can avoid that are those who never played it in the first place and are told by others. TLOU pulled its switch around halfway through the game, so much earlier and susceptible to backlacsh significantly sooner.
I'm amazed that more people didn't consider the story was trash with the intro of ME2. They ignored the consul believing in the reapers than killed Shepard for a time skip. They made the story about fighting bug monsters in a main plot that made no sense unless you already read the script. I could go on and on and on
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792
The 20 or 50 part essay series clarifying this.