To me the biggest problem the game (at least the first, didn't play the second) had was the total dissonance between the game part, and the story part.
Like okay, it's the apocalypse, and there's some fungus that killed 99% of humanity.
Every time you're in a "fighting humans" stage you're fighting like 300 guys who have absolutely zero regard for their own lives. Dudes run at you with baseball bats while you point a shotgun at them.
There's a "cannibal village" in the Colorado mountains, not only do you get captured by them dozens of miles away while they have a 'search party' (presumably looking for people to eat), but you kill like 100 of them right before that point. Then you kill like 100 more. Then when you escape there's THOUSANDS of them running out of the trees like it's a scene from 28 Days Later.
Where did they 'get' an uninfected town of thousands of people? Who do they recruit to be fellow cannibals and who do they eat? How is this a sustainable society at all if they were so desperate they spent all that energy and fuel to go out of the mountains to grab two people to presumably feed the entire village?
At some point you're at a dam, and sure enough, here come the suicidal hordes, who blow up everything just because they're bad guys, and you mow down dozens of them. Here you are in a city and there's more suicidal hordes of men just standing around waiting to die. Here you are in a town. Here you are in a hotel. Here you are in a forest. By the end of it you've probably killed like 3% of the global surviving population.
And on top of all of this, you're restricted with asinine game mechanics like "you can only carry 6 rifle rounds". You have the very-common-but-always immersion-breaking moments of enemies having infinite ammo and you kill them and only get one bullet. And this fungus that's supposed to be 100% lethal? You fight zombies that attack you with spore bombs. You walk or fall into spore clouds. Like you're totally immune to it. You can't have your game be based around this idea that this is dangerous and deadly and also have multiple gameplay moments where you just shake it off.
Another case of too many predators and not enough herbivores. Though unlike a lot of devs, who by and large are focused more on filling their worlds up with enemies for the player to kill, I can't help but wonder if Naughty Dog is so cynical they seriously believe most of humanity will turn to banditry in a post-apocalyptic scenario despite the logistical issues it presents.
And this fungus that's supposed to be 100% lethal? You fight zombies that attack you with spore bombs. You walk or fall into spore clouds.
It's fine, though! You always put on a mask whenever you go into spore-infested areas.
Geez, another retarded leftist belief that this game would predict!
Speaking of which, if cordyceps were able to wipe out most of humanity, then the world by and large should be uninhabitable for them. Most of humanity should have been turned into hosts for these mushrooms, which means there should be entire forests of them belching more of their toxic spores into the air, especially in the former metropolitan areas. We're talking more than there ever were when the apocalypse happened! What remains of humanity should have been driven underground, into specially-built settlements designed to keep the spores out, or into regions where the spores can't go. Instead, most humans are still living in the ruins of cities and major population centers, even though those would be the most heavily impacted by the cordyceps, the other cities are just overgrown ruins that humans can wander around just fine in, the wilderness is mostly untouched aside from the occasional infected milling around, and the spore-infested areas you find are in freaking underground tunnels or ruined building interiors!
Did ANYONE at Naughty Dog take a moment to seriously think about this setting?! The more flaws I find in TLoU world, the more I think they originally envisioned a typical zombie setting, but just threw in the evil magic mushrooms at the last minute.
the more I think they originally envisioned a typical zombie setting, but just threw in the evil magic mushrooms at the last minute.
It does track with the writers fart huffing egos that they couldn't do something "so cliche" like zombies, so they had to stroke their egos by naming it after a real mushroom that could totally work like that.
Most of humanity should have been turned into hosts for these mushrooms, which means there should be entire forests of them belching more of their toxic spores into the air, especially in the former metropolitan areas.
This is a really good point I haven't seen before. It could be explained by simple degradation, as in a typical cordyceps infection uses up human biomatter in a few months to a year, then dies and decays.
I think even back then Naughty Dog didn't really think through the entire logistics and logic of an apocalypse. Its why they treated the ending as "morally grey" instead of "the Fireflys were retards and had no chance of saving anyone" as everyone managed to figure out once they thought about it a little. Which of course got retconned by Part 2 to be "actually evil because they totes could save the world, somehow" to make it even worse.
At least in this case you can give it the suspension of disbelief of "its a video game element" and just slash the number you technically killed from 40 down to 4 "in the story" and it works fine. Its still dissonant but its workable.
I never had any real opinion on the Fireflies because literally everybody in that game was a total fucking cartoon. The writing was not good, and it is an insanely overrated game. Of course the Fireflies are a cartoon too, because the game had absolutely zero subtlety to it.
Half the theory crafting on the Internet is Redditors spazzing out because "they'll become dictators and control people with the vaccine", ignoring the part where 99% of human history was made under the direction of "dictators".
And literally if anything could be assumed about "control" of the world in TLOU it would be that most of the survivors have to go because clearly nearly everybody you meet is for some reason a deranged retarded psychopath because everybody has this dumbass nihilistic idea that "post apocalypse" means everybody becomes a Mad Max savage.
Meanwhile humanity faced multiple plagues that killed huge percentages of the population and disrupted society and exactly zero times did everybody turn into frothing cannibals.
So yeah the writing pushed the idea that they were incompetent and couldn't make a cure because it's the same extremism every writer feels they need to make it obvious who the "good guys" are.
It's like the Neo Nazi gun store owner who randomly shows up in Falling Down in one of the dumbest scenes in movie history.
The writing was not good, and it is an insanely overrated game.
Overrated yes, but I think it was fine for what it was. The writing worked internally and the emotional beats could land without stipulation.
they'll become dictators and control people with the vaccine
While this might seem too far for you, the idea that they have no logistical capability to mass produce and distribute the vaxx is just basic logic about the world and their shoddy setup. Which makes it not entirely too far an idea that they'd use it to increase their power and control of things, much closer to something like the USSR starving entire nations to death than a simple dictator. They've already shown themselves a few times to be acting in self-interest instead of altruism, so its easy to guess they'd use it as bargaining.
Its all headcanon assumptions, but there is nothing that proves it otherwise to support the second game's assertion that they were 100% morally good guys who were gonna save the world. The details of assumption doesn't need to be fully accurate, only able to support the idea that you could reasonably believe they wouldn't be that.
So yeah the writing pushed the idea that they were incompetent and couldn't make a cure
Its been a long time, but I don't think it was ever actually said in the first game. Its only implied by the fact that they killed someone immune before without success and then looking around to say "this don't seem possible." The game wants to say its "possible" to make Joel look morally grey, so its all those prior assumptions that says "they couldn't possibly make a cure."
Plus the fact that you can't vaccinate against fungal infections as far as I know, meaning its literally impossible. But that seems to be a pure writing mistake on their part likely stemming from them changing it from likely zombies to cordyceps mid development.
I do agree entirely that the fact that everyone seems to be a Mad Max psycho does mean the world probably isn't worth saving. The first game implies there is stable civilization where you live at the very beginning but then you never revisit any form of it. Its a whole lot of "humans are the real monsters" wank, like all hack writers.
While this might seem too far for you, the idea that they have no logistical capability to mass produce and distribute the vaxx is just basic logic about the world and their shoddy setup.
This is why bad writers poorly writing a game world that has no internal logic don't write good games.
What you're saying is logical and sensible, but you're making that argument in a game where there was no logic, there was no sense, and as you pointed out, it's clear that the writers didn't know what they were talking about half the time.
Yes, formulating a vaccine would require a massive lab, chemical vats, precision instrumentation, and probably many hard-to-acquire reagents.
But formulating a functional society requires fresh water, large-scale farming, sanitation, and cooperation.
The game decided to literally wave it's hand and determine that absolutely fuck-all about any of that was actually needed, so why do they need a vaccine lab? The writer just had to write one line claiming they could do it and who can say otherwise? 'Well we never see the lab', well we never see what the fuck this retarded cannibal village is eating to sustain a thousand people, up in the mountains, in winter, with nearly no vehicles. They just somehow survive because the game needed them to.
We ask the same questions as to how the nuclear-blasted ruins of Washington DC in Fallout 3 can somehow sustain an entire village living in a rusted aircraft carrier surrounded by a million billion Supermutants that look like they require 12,000 calories a day of pure protein to sustain their killer gains. There's zero farming, zero logistics, nothing at all. Everyone just survives because that's what they need the game to do. Christ the entire fucking game plot revolves around the fact that all the water is pure poison, what the fuck is everybody actually drinking then?
You don't ask because the writer didn't know either.
To me the biggest problem the game (at least the first, didn't play the second) had was the total dissonance between the game part, and the story part.
Like okay, it's the apocalypse, and there's some fungus that killed 99% of humanity.
Every time you're in a "fighting humans" stage you're fighting like 300 guys who have absolutely zero regard for their own lives. Dudes run at you with baseball bats while you point a shotgun at them.
There's a "cannibal village" in the Colorado mountains, not only do you get captured by them dozens of miles away while they have a 'search party' (presumably looking for people to eat), but you kill like 100 of them right before that point. Then you kill like 100 more. Then when you escape there's THOUSANDS of them running out of the trees like it's a scene from 28 Days Later.
Where did they 'get' an uninfected town of thousands of people? Who do they recruit to be fellow cannibals and who do they eat? How is this a sustainable society at all if they were so desperate they spent all that energy and fuel to go out of the mountains to grab two people to presumably feed the entire village?
At some point you're at a dam, and sure enough, here come the suicidal hordes, who blow up everything just because they're bad guys, and you mow down dozens of them. Here you are in a city and there's more suicidal hordes of men just standing around waiting to die. Here you are in a town. Here you are in a hotel. Here you are in a forest. By the end of it you've probably killed like 3% of the global surviving population.
And on top of all of this, you're restricted with asinine game mechanics like "you can only carry 6 rifle rounds". You have the very-common-but-always immersion-breaking moments of enemies having infinite ammo and you kill them and only get one bullet. And this fungus that's supposed to be 100% lethal? You fight zombies that attack you with spore bombs. You walk or fall into spore clouds. Like you're totally immune to it. You can't have your game be based around this idea that this is dangerous and deadly and also have multiple gameplay moments where you just shake it off.
Another case of too many predators and not enough herbivores. Though unlike a lot of devs, who by and large are focused more on filling their worlds up with enemies for the player to kill, I can't help but wonder if Naughty Dog is so cynical they seriously believe most of humanity will turn to banditry in a post-apocalyptic scenario despite the logistical issues it presents.
It's fine, though! You always put on a mask whenever you go into spore-infested areas.
Geez, another retarded leftist belief that this game would predict!
Speaking of which, if cordyceps were able to wipe out most of humanity, then the world by and large should be uninhabitable for them. Most of humanity should have been turned into hosts for these mushrooms, which means there should be entire forests of them belching more of their toxic spores into the air, especially in the former metropolitan areas. We're talking more than there ever were when the apocalypse happened! What remains of humanity should have been driven underground, into specially-built settlements designed to keep the spores out, or into regions where the spores can't go. Instead, most humans are still living in the ruins of cities and major population centers, even though those would be the most heavily impacted by the cordyceps, the other cities are just overgrown ruins that humans can wander around just fine in, the wilderness is mostly untouched aside from the occasional infected milling around, and the spore-infested areas you find are in freaking underground tunnels or ruined building interiors!
Did ANYONE at Naughty Dog take a moment to seriously think about this setting?! The more flaws I find in TLoU world, the more I think they originally envisioned a typical zombie setting, but just threw in the evil magic mushrooms at the last minute.
It does track with the writers fart huffing egos that they couldn't do something "so cliche" like zombies, so they had to stroke their egos by naming it after a real mushroom that could totally work like that.
This is a really good point I haven't seen before. It could be explained by simple degradation, as in a typical cordyceps infection uses up human biomatter in a few months to a year, then dies and decays.
I think even back then Naughty Dog didn't really think through the entire logistics and logic of an apocalypse. Its why they treated the ending as "morally grey" instead of "the Fireflys were retards and had no chance of saving anyone" as everyone managed to figure out once they thought about it a little. Which of course got retconned by Part 2 to be "actually evil because they totes could save the world, somehow" to make it even worse.
At least in this case you can give it the suspension of disbelief of "its a video game element" and just slash the number you technically killed from 40 down to 4 "in the story" and it works fine. Its still dissonant but its workable.
I never had any real opinion on the Fireflies because literally everybody in that game was a total fucking cartoon. The writing was not good, and it is an insanely overrated game. Of course the Fireflies are a cartoon too, because the game had absolutely zero subtlety to it.
Half the theory crafting on the Internet is Redditors spazzing out because "they'll become dictators and control people with the vaccine", ignoring the part where 99% of human history was made under the direction of "dictators".
And literally if anything could be assumed about "control" of the world in TLOU it would be that most of the survivors have to go because clearly nearly everybody you meet is for some reason a deranged retarded psychopath because everybody has this dumbass nihilistic idea that "post apocalypse" means everybody becomes a Mad Max savage.
Meanwhile humanity faced multiple plagues that killed huge percentages of the population and disrupted society and exactly zero times did everybody turn into frothing cannibals.
So yeah the writing pushed the idea that they were incompetent and couldn't make a cure because it's the same extremism every writer feels they need to make it obvious who the "good guys" are.
It's like the Neo Nazi gun store owner who randomly shows up in Falling Down in one of the dumbest scenes in movie history.
Overrated yes, but I think it was fine for what it was. The writing worked internally and the emotional beats could land without stipulation.
While this might seem too far for you, the idea that they have no logistical capability to mass produce and distribute the vaxx is just basic logic about the world and their shoddy setup. Which makes it not entirely too far an idea that they'd use it to increase their power and control of things, much closer to something like the USSR starving entire nations to death than a simple dictator. They've already shown themselves a few times to be acting in self-interest instead of altruism, so its easy to guess they'd use it as bargaining.
Its all headcanon assumptions, but there is nothing that proves it otherwise to support the second game's assertion that they were 100% morally good guys who were gonna save the world. The details of assumption doesn't need to be fully accurate, only able to support the idea that you could reasonably believe they wouldn't be that.
Its been a long time, but I don't think it was ever actually said in the first game. Its only implied by the fact that they killed someone immune before without success and then looking around to say "this don't seem possible." The game wants to say its "possible" to make Joel look morally grey, so its all those prior assumptions that says "they couldn't possibly make a cure."
Plus the fact that you can't vaccinate against fungal infections as far as I know, meaning its literally impossible. But that seems to be a pure writing mistake on their part likely stemming from them changing it from likely zombies to cordyceps mid development.
I do agree entirely that the fact that everyone seems to be a Mad Max psycho does mean the world probably isn't worth saving. The first game implies there is stable civilization where you live at the very beginning but then you never revisit any form of it. Its a whole lot of "humans are the real monsters" wank, like all hack writers.
This is why bad writers poorly writing a game world that has no internal logic don't write good games.
What you're saying is logical and sensible, but you're making that argument in a game where there was no logic, there was no sense, and as you pointed out, it's clear that the writers didn't know what they were talking about half the time.
Yes, formulating a vaccine would require a massive lab, chemical vats, precision instrumentation, and probably many hard-to-acquire reagents.
But formulating a functional society requires fresh water, large-scale farming, sanitation, and cooperation.
The game decided to literally wave it's hand and determine that absolutely fuck-all about any of that was actually needed, so why do they need a vaccine lab? The writer just had to write one line claiming they could do it and who can say otherwise? 'Well we never see the lab', well we never see what the fuck this retarded cannibal village is eating to sustain a thousand people, up in the mountains, in winter, with nearly no vehicles. They just somehow survive because the game needed them to.
We ask the same questions as to how the nuclear-blasted ruins of Washington DC in Fallout 3 can somehow sustain an entire village living in a rusted aircraft carrier surrounded by a million billion Supermutants that look like they require 12,000 calories a day of pure protein to sustain their killer gains. There's zero farming, zero logistics, nothing at all. Everyone just survives because that's what they need the game to do. Christ the entire fucking game plot revolves around the fact that all the water is pure poison, what the fuck is everybody actually drinking then?
You don't ask because the writer didn't know either.