You Xin "The Last of the Survivors" Tasting Award entries
Perhaps never before has a game been so divided between "professionals" and gamers. On June 19, 2020, "The Last of Us Part 2" (hereinafter referred to as "The Last of Us 2") scored 96 points on the famous rating website Metacritic as soon as it was launched. Not only on the Internet, but also a number of domestic media at that time also gave high praise such as "miracle", "10 points", "full score answer sheet" and "the world's best", and even Yuka (Feng Ji) and Yang Qi, the main creators of "Black Myth: Wukong", known as "domestic light", gave high praise to the game.
However, after the player personally started the Last of Us 2, he was angry with the game, and as a plot-driven sequel, the first thing is the game's "outrageous", "perverted" and "difficult" plot. As a result, the player user gave the game an extremely low score of 2.4 points on the M station. At the TGA 2020 awards ceremony that year, The Last of Us 2 won the award of Game of the Year, which further tore the gap between the player group and the "professionals".
Time has passed, and the lead has been washed away. Today, the user rating of The Last of Us 2 on M station has quietly climbed to 5.8 points. Although it is still a "failing" work, this work has now received in-depth understanding and comprehensive evaluation from some players. Good games are much the same, bad games have their own misfortunes. How exactly did The Last of Us 2 become the target of everyone? And is it really useless? On the occasion of the recent launch of "The Last of Us: Chapter 1" on PC, this article will share with you the gains and losses of the sequel.
Game Seven Deadly Sins: Neil's Pride and Prejudice
In recent years, after witnessing the launch of popular works such as The Last of Us 2 and "Cyberpunk 2077", players have sighed: high score trust media, low score believe in themselves.
Especially compared to the original Last Survivors, who scored a perfect score of 10 on IGN and was nominated for TGA's 2013 Game of the Year, we may feel more sorry for the failure of the sequel. The author summarizes that the last survivor 2 roughly has the following seven sins that "offended" the player.
- Blocked reviews. Back in the 2016 game trailer, players already saw Joel and Ellie playing guitar in the final room of the game; In the trailer at the beginning of 2019, Ellie was covered by Joel on the way to revenge Abby, and the line was "You thought I would let you do this alone"; In the May trailer on the eve of the game's official launch, Joel interacted with Ellie frequently. In short, all the information at that time pointed to the fact that Joel was not just a form-by-scene dispensable character.
Just when players are looking forward to Ellie and Joel fighting side by side again in the sequel, the game uses a "golf" shot from the previous two hours to strongly declare that these are actually "teaser scams". What is even more infuriating is that at that time, the domestic and foreign media signed a confidentiality agreement during the trial version of the review, and generally did not "fulfill the obligation" to inform players of the game's plot and narrative bugs, and even gave full scores to the game, resulting in many media being questioned by players about professionalism after the game was launched, so that the crisis of players' trust in professional reviewers continues to this day.
- Joel is dead. For a successful game (especially a triple-A masterpiece) IP, all production teams tend to cling to this "cash cow" and "exhaust" the IP's wool as much as possible to squeeze out its residual value - you don't see CDPR rebooting the "wizard" IP after the "thunderstorm" of "Cyberpunk 2077" to actively save itself. It can be said that the production team is often cautious in dealing with the "death" of the protagonist of their previous work.
However, Naughty Dog Studio, the Last of Us 2 production team, did the opposite, not only allowing Joel to hurriedly "take the bento" in the sequel, but also forcibly losing his wisdom, making players feel that their IQ was pressed to the ground and rubbed.
- Arrogant and "psychopathic" producer. There's no denying that Naughty Dog Game Director Neil Druckmann has played an inestimable role in the birth and success of the last survivors. However, as Neil began to rise to high positions within the studio, he became more assertive.
Especially in the creation of The Last of Us 2, Neil even "tried to exclude the crowd" to write Joel to death, and let Ellie and Abby in the ending forcibly reach a reconciliation. Not only that, in the face of the doubts of players after the game was launched, Neil not only went "online" with players on social media, but also held grievances about Abby's experience, and his comments citing players on his "psychopath" in the live broadcast were widely spread in the simplified online context.
- ZZ correct. In recent years, European and American Lgbtqiapkdxrew has become very popular, and Neil, as an Israeli YT native, clearly knows it. As early as during the development of the original Last Survivor, Neil met the famous European and American NQ fighter Anita Sarkeesian, and Neil who was deeply influenced by him not only added the role of Homo Bill to the work, but also added Nadine, a black female character comparable to men, in "Uncharted: The Lost Legacy".
In The Last of Us 2, the game adds a lover Tina to Ellie at the beginning - and it is difficult for players to empathize with the feelings between the two, and also adds Asian characters such as Yara and Lefor in accordance with the trend - the latter is also transgender and deeply loved by Abby, plus the now beautiful "Draco" YT people and their YT teaching elements, Neil really stacks Buff. Amazingly, even removing many of the correct characters from ZZ does not affect the progress of the game, and there are many characters that are almost nothing related to the game's story. But the benefits may also be obvious, the game beat Assemble in one fell swoop! Masterpieces such as "Animal Crossing" and "Final Fantasy 7: Remake" won the TGA Game of the Year, and it's hard to say how much right talk has a potential bonus to the selection.
- The character forcibly lowers his intelligence. In order to advance the game's plot, Last Survivor 2 also used many bridges that could not withstand scrutiny to force the characters to "IQ not online". Including but not limited to letting Joel and Tommy unreservedly rescue Abby trapped in the wind and snow and expose themselves, Abby who accepted Leph without reservation just because the other party was transgender, and rescued Abby who was tied up and released each other despite all odds...
In short, the game does not pave the way for the character changes, and many plots are also advanced in a mechanical séance.
- Fragmented gameplay. Another major criticism of The Last of Us 2 is the separation from the gameplay and plot. As Ellie embarks on the road to revenge for Joel, who was "headshot", the originally linear narrative game is made into an open box court design in the "Seattle Day 1" chapter.
It is undeniable that in recent years, "open world" has become more and more synonymous with triple-A, but not all games are suitable for building with open world. In this work, the player was originally full of anger after Joel's death, but the production team forced the player to slow down in the chapter, and this exploration and puzzle solving of more than 2 hours at every turn could not be said to have helped the game's plot very much, and it also made the player more and more irritable, and the overall storytelling rhythm was disjointed.
- Strongly didactic. Admittedly, for many players, it's actually about having fun in the game. Therefore, how to keep the player's adrenaline pumping and get the player pleasure is the focus of many production teams. The advantage of Last Survivor 1 is that the construction of the scene and the setting of the enemies are all in the service of the game's story, and the battles in it are often "heinous" infected and marauders, and players often do not have a moral burden when killing each other.
However, in the game, Naughty Dog does not prepare the player's thoughts, but often allows the player to control the character when facing enemies with too many "Virgin Heart" flood performances, such as compassion after killing pregnant women on the Washington Liberation Front (WLF), making the player's combat experience extremely unpleasant. In order to promote the theme of "forgiving each other" to show the brilliance of human nature in the end times, the game also forcibly "feeds" the player, bluntly forcing the player to get rid of Abby, and letting the player-controlled Ellie finally release her.
Game Breaks: Is Game of the Year Overstated?
Nowadays, when everyone talks about the last survivor 2, there are mostly negative evaluations, and there are few "reasonable customers". People who love it say it's "the funest" and "cloud players" who say it's rotten; Those who don't like it say it's "e-waste" and don't deserve TGA's game of the year, and even more so TGA proves itself to be a "pheasant award" with the selection.
Is that really the case? "Black Myth: Wukong" creator Feng Ji once said that after playing The Last of Us 2, he was desperate, because he didn't know how the production technology in it was achieved, basically all front-line practitioners did not admire the technical power of naughty dogs.
Although the author has always disliked the comparison of "Guan Gong vs. Qin Qiong", the evaluation of many well-known awards in all walks of life cannot erase the subjective color because of the existence of "people", so there is also a large market for "conspiracy theories" and "shady theories". In addition, the author believes that all the players' air scolding and void enemies will not actually add a little color to the "IDOL game" they support, but the author agrees with a view: a good game needs to prove itself with industry awards.
In fact, according to TGA's hard index, the best game of the year is not necessarily the most fun game, but a game with more highlights in the most fun aspects on a comprehensive basis, which is commonly known as "innovation". From this point of view, the real physics engine and strong background detail rendering and other technologies of Last of Us 2 are all top displays with large investment and long development cycles, even compared with the same period of 3A.
In fact, the production characteristics of the 3A masterpiece determine that the game itself will not be a "word" of a person. In fact, neither the "success" of the first last survivor nor the "failure" of the last survivor 2 will be the merits of Neil alone, but the joint product of the collusion of the upper team and investors.
It can be seen that Naughty Dog, based on the success of the first part and the "Uncharted" series, wants to jump out of the game "commercial products" and use the "small repairs" of "titty music" conventional 3A (or open-world masterpieces) to cater to the player's attributes, and instead wants to make a big fuss on "dual protagonists and dual narratives" to produce a plot-driven "ninth artwork". From this point of view, even if the world is in disapproval, the author is willing to give high marks to the last survivors.
However, this widening of the game's narrative boundaries has undoubtedly failed, and this new attempt to "gamble" on 3A has undoubtedly caused a lose-lose outcome for manufacturers, media, and players. In fact, the flashbacks and interpolations of the producers in this work that are too "self-free" not only fragment the game rhythm narrative, but also a sequel with a slight improvement in all directions if the order of several game plots can be adjusted and replaced. In the case that everything is going to "rotten" at the end of the story, if you can give players a free choice of ending, you may be able to save the reputation of this work to a certain extent.
Just like many of our authors, they are obsessed with their own works, and they can't tolerate the sand in their eyes - the success of the first generation undoubtedly makes Naughty Dog believe in his own choices more, believe in his production skills and plot foreshadowing, and will make this work like the original even if it does not give players the right to choose the ending, but still can reap "applause and applause". And the stark fact is undoubtedly a wake-up call for all makers: it may be easy to challenge the rules themselves, but for climbing the mountain of games, what we see is still only "blind people touching elephants", and there are many things to learn waiting for future generations to explore.
Of course, the author also agrees that for The Last Survivor 2, talking about industry aside from the plot is undoubtedly a derivative version of "putting aside the facts", which is meaningless and biased. However, Naughty Dog still has the courage and enthusiasm to explore new areas at a time when the triple-A game industry is in a stagnant pool, which is undoubtedly valuable. As for success or failure, let the market decide.
Finally, the author would like to end with a passage from Ellie and Joel in the memories at the end of The Last of Us 2:
"You're such an asshole! I don't mean it... I should have died in that hospital so that my life would have meaning. But you deprived me of my rights. ”
"If God gave me a second chance, I would still do it."
"yes, I just... I don't think I'll ever forgive you, but I'm willing to give it a try. ”