It takes all of 20 seconds and is more involving than fetching emblems to open doors in RE4 (that game's non-combat "loop"). Given it's done only five times I can recall off-hand (
subway, hotel, sewer, dam, drain
Trying to play other games after TLoU
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AcceptableGhost
Member
you better watch out dude I got called a dudebro for saying the (press triangle to drop ladder / moving pallets / moving garbage) sequences were obnoxious
Crash Station
Member
Sounds like the feeling I had after Persona 4. Went through some hardcore withdrawal upon completing that masterpiece.
The Mango Sentinel
Member
It takes all of 20 seconds and is more involving than fetching emblems to open doors in RE4 (that game's non-combat "loop"). Given it's done only five times I can recall off-hand (), it's hardly an inconvenience. They even mixed it up at times by making you dive to dislodge stuck gears or sidle up and around pipes to reach the pallet up on a platform in the first place.subway, hotel, sewer, dam, drain
4 times too many....though I could've accepted it happening twice, just for funny dialog. It's not necessarily a huge inconvenience, just minor, but it's just one of the few reasons I wouldn't give this game a perfect score and I have no desire to play it again any time soon.
Sure. Hopefully you'll revisit the game someday. I found it played a lot tighter and quicker on the second playthrough, since I had a better sense of the layout of each place. The
university
LiveFromKyoto
Member
I don't know about dudebro, but you're definitely exaggerating. The exact same type of puzzle appears in every adventure-type game ever, except usually way more often. I don't know how anybody could have played video games for any length of time while being traumatized by a couple of move-the-inanimate-object-to-cross-the-gap puzzles. Like, a Tomb Raider or a Zelda game would kill you.
NinjaCatfish
Member
I don't understand, The Last of Us was FANTASTIC, absolutely, but it wasn't INVALIDATE ALL OTHER VIDEOGAMES fantastic.
Honestly, I found that Spec Ops: The Line had more of an effect on me playing other games, starting to think of the atrocities I was committing as Nathan Drake in the name of fun and adventure.
Do what I'm doing and play Silent Hill 2, it will make you realise that TLoU was hardly ever more than a bit tense.
Honestly, I found that Spec Ops: The Line had more of an effect on me playing other games, starting to think of the atrocities I was committing as Nathan Drake in the name of fun and adventure.
Do what I'm doing and play Silent Hill 2, it will make you realise that TLoU was hardly ever more than a bit tense.
I couldn't agree more. The water/pallete sections of the game were not fun for me at all, but I hate water and swimming sections in most games.
Never forget Devil May Cry 1 swimming.
The Xtortionist
Member
It takes all of 20 seconds and is more involving than fetching emblems to open doors in RE4 (that game's non-combat "loop"). Given it's done only five times I can recall off-hand (), it's hardly an inconvenience. They even mixed it up at times by making you dive to dislodge stuck gears or sidle up and around pipes to reach the pallet up on a platform in the first place.subway, hotel, sewer, dam, drain
Collecting keys in RE4 was merely an excuse to send the player through more awesome combat encounters. A more apt comparison would be TLOU's ladder/palette/dumpster sections and RE4's puzzles, and that's not even a contest.
I found the swimming in TLoU unintuitive until I realized you only need to tap Circle once -- Joel will then sink to the "swimming depth," and from there you steer him with the sticks. Likewise, you only need to tap X once to surface. I think other games had conditioned me to repeatedly tap buttons to sink/swim, lol.
The ending and themes of Spec Ops: The Line were unquestionably more interesting, memorable, and something I thought about constantly after finishing the game in a way I don't about The Last of Us.
A lot of that has to do with the personal relevance of my military background.
I've never experienced a parasitic end of the world scenario, The Last of Us didn't feel quite so personal, it's not really fair.
You'll probably think twice the next time you order mushrooms on pizza, though!
AcceptableGhost
Member
If your building a game that encourages replay (for mastery of combat in this games case, with the difficulty settings) you don't gate the parts of the game that actually scale to difficulty with tons of shit that doesn't (and that is unskippable).
Between these none-puzzles and the unskippable scripted sequences, this game isn't built for replays. Which is fine. But don't include higher difficulties if you aren't going to make it pleasant for people who want to replay your game.
Edit: At the very, very least they should have kept in the fast forward mode from Uncharted 1 / Uncharted 2.
Nemesis_
Member
The only real "thoughts" I had regarding The Last of Us was when the ending came. And I've discussed it prior - I wonder if it really was the right thing to do. And I think that they did a good job of highlighting
how you know what Joel did was wrong but still you sympathised for him since you spent the entirety of the game with Ellie
But yeah, you're right. People who think TLOU is some CULTURAL ZENITH in gaming should probably play a wider breadth of games.
Silent Hill 2 (and by extension, kinda, Rule of Rose) presented some more confronting imagery / themes / thoughts in that regard, I felt. And I know they are both games that aren't necessarily played or experienced by the mainstream.
Which is my biggest issue with TLoU. It's not particularly innovative - it's stuff we've seen before but people who might not have seen said things would find it so WOW and AMAZING. I suppose it's worth highlighting that this is more of a problem with the people who like TLOU rather than TLOU itself, I guess.
tl;dr it's great but not as game changing as people are saying and I think the experiences you get from TLOU can be experienced in other games elsewhere if not in a better executed delivery.
I have a sneaking suspicion these aren't the same fungi >______________>
The Mango Sentinel
Member
Yeah I'm not sure why swimming in most games is dogshit, and this game was no exception.....though it was slightly less bad than most.
Probably because it doesn't really happen all that often and it's usually over pretty quickly. I agree it is less bad than most.
Chuck Norris
Banned
Well if exploration and lengthy stealth approach are a big part of the experience, than yeah
CharminUltra
Member
The TLOU hyperbole sure is getting out of hand.
The story was good and the gameplay was decent. A really nice game that doesn't break any new ground when it comes to gameplay. I suspect people saying the game is some sort of life-changing experience haven't really played many games or read many books.
The story was good and the gameplay was decent. A really nice game that doesn't break any new ground when it comes to gameplay. I suspect people saying the game is some sort of life-changing experience haven't really played many games or read many books.
The Mango Sentinel
Member
Yeah this is pretty much how I feel. I really hope the DLC is some kind of horde mode cause I like how intense the combat could be at times.
I'm gonna post this in the TLOU thread and see if I get blasted for it. I think it would be a great idea having to manage your supplies and craft shit for as long as you can while taking out enemies.
I've bought it but haven't played TLOU yet -- is this true? Is it like Uncharted 2? That'd be a big disappointment.
So, I guess the max scores are from the same people who gave max scores to Uncharted and the likes? Ridiculous.
I was a bit excited about the gameplay after the previews, and the focus on non linear areas, but did this hold up in the actual game? How about the crafting? I've read a couple of comments regarding it, and it sounds like what I thought it'd be -- an extremely basic, more or less context sensitive system - like, you only get a couple of components, and there are only a couple of things you can make.
Nemesis_
Member
I think the biggest thing they did right with the swimming was the fact that most of the areas you were swimming in were relatively open.
There was one moment that I remember being very awful, and that was the first swimming segment. I found an area with some collectibles, so it was non-optional, but it was very closed in so it was dreadful to control combined with the camera angle (think MGS2's swimming segments).
The rest were all open and very manageable. Most of them didn't even require too much underwater interaction and instead you spent most of the time spinning around on the surface.
It just felt like another way to "build' the relationship between Joel and Ellie since Ellie conveniently couldn't swim. But whoever mentioned it earlier was right - it is telling that they wrote dialogue for Ellie making fun of the repetitiveness of it all and yet they still didn't make an effort to fix it.
I mean every time I came to a water area I knew all I had to do was open some kind of door to make a pallet appear and then move it to where Ellie was. That to me isn't really great game design.
Precisely.
Might sound weird but I feel like TLOU does a great job at enacting what it would feel like to play a Zombie encounter in films like 28 Days or Weeks Later. The emphasis on running and enemies coming from all angles. It's not a very clear cut comparison but it's something that stood out to me. >_> On a kind of irrelevant side note - I wish the soundtrack was more like that series and less like some kind of Metro 2033/Last Light inspired strings based score.
CharminUltra
Member
Framerate was worse in my experience. The gameplay does have that ND flavor, but the enemies don't feel like bullet sponges like they do in U2 that much.
The story is way grittier than U2's. More like The Walking Dead than Indiana Jones.
The AI is not very smart. You don't need to be Sam fisher in the stealth scenarios of the game.
startyourengine
Member
i finished hotline miami on vita after TLoU. much shorter game but the gameplay is also very addicting.
Let's not get condescending here! Many of the people singing TLoU's praises here have played plenty of games, watched plenty of films and read plenty of books, and not just mainstream fare, either. (I list 999 as one of my favorite story-centric games alongside TLoU, for starters!)
What's remarkable about TLoU is the balance it strikes -- it does many things well together that most games do well individually, and the gameplay and story feel like two parts of a cohesive whole. For example, the way enemy encounters play out -- all tense and taut and raw and brutal -- feels perfectly in sync with the hardscrabble way that survival is depicted in story beats.
It's not so much a matter of innovation as it is a matter of execution. TLoU is deftly handled and tightly designed in that regard, taking some familiar beats from existing media and breathing new life into them through a richly-realized interactive world. When it comes to films, I've seen people point to various aspects of "Children of Men," "The Road," "No Country for Old Men," "There Will Be Blood," and "I Am Legend," but it's a whole different beast when they're all rolled together into something you play, something you advance at your own tempo, something you can take in at length and approach in different ways.
And to pull it off at this level of quality means there's the potential for people to come away affected. Maybe even a little haunted.
Nemesis_
Member
I thought the AI was clever for the humans but definitely not for the clickers and the infected. The humans often flanked you so you couldn't just wait in cover and pick them off one by one. This is something the game did really well, IMO.
The clickers on the other hand seemed rather easy to evade and even easier to take down once you got a handle on the game's crafting system. And this was playing on Hard.
This reminds me though - one of TLOU's biggest missteps is combining a stealthy approach where you have to evade all the enemies with a wave-like spawning approach. It is counter intuitive to expect your players to take down all the enemies (assuming they play this way) and then spawn in more random enemies.
Of course, you could just sneak past them without doing anything then, like I did for every moment in the game bar the (last location spoiler)
hospital
Let's not get condescending here! Many of the people singing TLoU's praises here have played plenty of games, watched plenty of films and read plenty of books, and not just mainstream fare, either. (I list 999 as one of my favorite story-centric games alongside TLoU, for starters!)
What's remarkable about TLoU is the balance it strikes -- it does many things well together that most games do well individually, and the gameplay and story feel like two parts of a cohesive whole. For example, the way enemy encounters play out -- all tense and taut and raw and brutal -- feels perfectly in sync with the hardscrabble way that survival is depicted in story beats.
It's not so much a matter of innovation as it is a matter of execution. TLoU is deftly handled and tightly designed in that regard, taking some familiar beats from existing media and breathing new life into them through a richly-realized interactive world. When it comes to films, I've seen people point to various aspects of "Children of Men," "The Road," "No Country for Old Men," "There Will Be Blood," and "I Am Legend," but it's a whole different beast when they're all rolled together into something you play, something you advance at your own tempo, something you can take in at length and approach in different ways.
Do you think the game is well paced, Neits?
Animation and art are excellent, but the resolution and fps are horrible.I'm used to 1080p to each eye or 120fps in 1080p i cant just play 720p with inconsistent 30 fps frame without my eyes burning every 5 minutes. Its like going from watching movies on blueray to VHS.
I really hope they announce ps4 1080p 60 fps version soon :/
On survivor I sneak past quickly at every chance I get. Not really a fan of long drawn out encounters with low supplies that may ensue from taking out one or two lookouts only to be spotted and shot on site. I still thoroughly enjoy the game.
Roland1979
Junior Member
That doesn't even make sense, both are not "bad for you".
If you're against games then why are you on GAF, where we discuss them?
The opposite for me. I bought the Orange Box right after completing Halo 3 and was never impressed by any of it.
Yeah.
I compared the pacing to RE4, in that no one encounter or area in-between seems to overstay its welcome. The only area that felt a bit taxing was the
university campus
But I don't mind the ladder/pallet/trolley loop. Maybe it's because I fundamentally like the feeling of the controls -- very firm and deliberate, with nice "tiers" to walking/jogging/running, depending on the intensity of the moment and how cramped your surroundings are. The character movement is tight and the camera is fluid, so I quite liked simply walking around and panning the camera to drink in the surroundings.
Also, I felt they did a decent job mixing up the loop. For example, sometimes they subvert your expectation by having a ladder break away or a trolley roll out of control rather than slotting neatly into place as a platform. Sometimes you have to set up a ladder, climb it, pull it up, drop it in another spot, hop down, pick it up and turn it into a makeshift bridge. In one case, to reach a pallet to convey Ellie across the water, you have to dive to the other side, climb up into the rafters and crawl between pipes to reach the pallet on the catwalk. They repeated certain tropes, but they added extra wrinkles to mix it up a bit. Since the whole point of these tropes is to "mix up the gameplay" in general, at 20 seconds a pop, I thought it was fine.
And then of course you have random bits like
being strung upside-down
riding horses
CharminUltra
Member
There is literally nothing mentioned in this post that other games haven't done better. On the contrary, these "tense and taut and raw and brutal" encounters often turn into "just run to the end of the level to progress" or "enemies are so dumb they can't see characters right in front of them" situations.Let's not get condescending here! Many of the people singing TLoU's praises here have played plenty of games, watched plenty of films and read plenty of books, and not just mainstream fare, either. (I list 999 as one of my favorite story-centric games alongside TLoU, for starters!)
What's remarkable about TLoU is the balance it strikes -- it does many things well together that most games do well individually, and the gameplay and story feel like two parts of a cohesive whole. For example, the way enemy encounters play out -- all tense and taut and raw and brutal -- feels perfectly in sync with the hardscrabble way that survival is depicted in story beats.
It's not so much a matter of innovation as it is a matter of execution. TLoU is deftly handled and tightly designed in that regard, taking some familiar beats from existing media and breathing new life into them through a richly-realized interactive world. When it comes to films, I've seen people point to various aspects of "Children of Men," "The Road," "No Country for Old Men," "There Will Be Blood," and "I Am Legend," but it's a whole different beast when they're all rolled together into something you play, something you advance at your own tempo, something you can take in at length and approach in different ways.
And to pull it off at this level of quality means there's the potential for people to come away affected. Maybe even a little haunted.
Thus my "haven't played many games" comment. There is very little in TLOU that hasn't been done to death (and with substantially better results) in other games, with better framerate and at a higher resolution to boot.
What games do everything TLoU does even better? Because I've played many, many, many games, and I'm hard-pressed to think of one that strikes the same gameplay balance with the same level of tight design and with such astounding world-building, narrative qualities and production values.
CharminUltra
Member
Deus Ex, as a quick example off the top of my head, and it wouldn't even be my top choice.
Actually, it's not really a good example as the gameplay in Deux Ex was actually fresh, innovative and, over time, deeply influential. Unlike TLOU's which is basically more of the same stuff we've seen before, only in a different package.
KaptinKeezey
Banned
There are no games like the Last of Us...... you will just have to wait.
My thoughts exactly. Have the people who think TLOU is some kind of game changer played Spec Ops? Find it hard to believe.
Dragon1893
Member
Same thing happened to me. Had to go with something completely different like Fire Emblem but I still end up going back to TLOU to complete my survivor run.
I can't get away from that world and those incredible characters.
I can't get away from that world and those incredible characters.
Finished the game weeks ago. First I'm realizing this.
Dragon1893
Member
It's a good game but it's not even in the same league.