What's up with all the negativity around The Last of Us now?

Its typical jaded cynical gamer. Prior to release = BEST GAME EVAR!

After release = What a load of overhyped tripe (its always tripe BTW) I am going to go play Deus Ex or Vampire The Masquerade, or some other decade old sacred cow.


I'm sure people have legitimate gripes, others want recognition for not liking the next big thing.
 
Did a gafer just make a portrait video..of a widescreen tv..
 
Because it's fun to hate popular things?

A lot of complaints i see are trivial and nit picking that a lot of people don't do to their favorite games or games they really like but that isn't to say that the game doesn't have problems or that everyone's negative opinions aren't valid. The real question is, why do you or should you care? I don't care what anyone has to say about the game because i want to experience it myself. Everyone acted like Bioshock Infinite was the second coming of christ and did no wrong and found numerous things wrong with that game but i still loved it.
 
A Naughty Dog game with great characters and story and great visual presentation but less than stellar gameplay?

Surely you jest.
Most of their games have featured excellent, well designed gameplay mechanics. Uncharted 1 was rough, but the rest of their games this gen (and their previous games) are top notch.
 
I've already beaten the game.
I have slight issues with:
Frame rate - dips in places
Image quality - bad in some places, especially when you throw a molotov
Input lag - slight issues there, nothing gamebreaking

Issues that are there but I don't really have a problem:
Friendly AI not being detected - it's frankly for the best, because the friendly AI isn't great
Combat repetition - stealthily killing everything can be boring, but that's not how to enjoy the game imo.

The real meat of the game is not really the stealth combat, it's when you fuck up the stealth, and all shit breaks loose. The character models are brilliant and the story is very well written, and it sums up to be a glorious experience.
 
Many people should have started playing in the 8 bits era to appreciate things better.I doubt some of you enjoy any games at all, seriously.
 
Looking at Gamerankings all time best, I'd say that Ocarina, Galaxy 1, Galaxy 2, Soulcalibur, Orange Box and Metroid Prime are all largely still loved today.

Uncharted 2 is more iffy, but still far more positive.

GTA4 is the only real outlier and it's the biggest example ever of games journalists overhyping something.

You could find people complaining about every single one of those games. I actually quite clearly remember people hating on Galaxy 2 because it didn't do enough different from Galaxy 1.
 
I bet if U3 came out first, people would pan U2. The first Uncharted was great, but had a LOT of issues, which were corrected with U2. U3 didn't have as much to improve upon, so it was viewed as being dissapointing.

Went back to play U2 after playing U3 and hating it (I thought the same thing as you). U3 has no balance, no pacing, no "quiet moments" to balance out the perpetual gun battles. It's a straight arena shooter, with monster closets and predictable triggers, and lousy, lousy gunplay. The gunplay in U2 wasn't good either, but there was a balance to the game of quiet moments mixed in with epic firefights. U3 is epic firefight after epic firefight, but the gunplay is bad, so it becomes a bad game.

Just the story / SP mode though.
 
There were numerous people criticizing GTA4 a month after release. And nothing can excuse reviewers ridiculous talk about GTA4's storyline.

1) Who were those people that criticized it a month after release? How many were there that did that?

2) Did game reviewers have a month with GTAIV before writing up their reviews, or was it probably about a week or less?

All I'm saying is that it's easy to look back on the game's faults now (i.e. the constant cell phone harassment to go on dates with your cousin), but at the time the game was pretty amazing.
 
CoD is the biggest game series in the world right now but anyone who says they have near universal love among gamers is lying out their ass.

Compared to games like Galaxy and Ocarina, GTA4 receives far more hate. It's not even debatable.

Receives more hate from who? Nintendo fans? The only trolls I ever read about GTA4 are the ones laughing at review hyperbole (durr durr Oscar worthy). Judging from the amount of people who still play this game today and the massive hype for GTA5, I'd say far, far more people liked the game than didn't.
 
Here's my situation. Despite loving all of the Uncharted games, I have had zero interest in The Last of Us since it was announced. I just typically do not enjoy stressful, survival-horror, resource-scarce games. So now the game is getting a crazy amount of praise in the media. This is getting me hyped and want to try the game, despite actively being against everything I thought this game was about. I'll probably play it. But will I like it?
 
GTAIV was praised by the game press as "the perfect game"

And, as we all know, its awful.

Im not saying the Last of Us is a bad game. Didnt play it, kinda wish i had a ps3 to play it. But then i remember to always be careful with the gaming press.
 
Reviewers still have throbbing hard ons for games as movies.

The true gamers out there are starting to get sick of cinematic experiences.
 
BTW.. someone contact Polygon.. they need to adjust their score for this game. Remember they downgraded Sim City because of launch problems. Now TLOU has a big bug.. ;o)
 
Yeah, the game isn't perfect (what can you expect from a cinematic, linear, setpiece-driven script fest?), but it's certainly much more interesting in terms of tone than your Uncharteds and Tomb Raiders. I don't see any backlash?

So far, I'd say that the survival gameplay coupled with the presentation (audio, visuals, characters) make the game one of the better ones within its genre (cinematic, linear, scripted shooters) - it is certainly much more interesting than what we've otherwise seen in the genre.
 
Reviewers still have throbbing hard ons for games as movies.

The true gamers out there are starting to get sick of cinematic experiences.
Yeah, my first game was Amstrad version of Space Invaders and I enjoy ND's games like no game out there...figure out.
 
Have you played the game ?

No but its not just this game.
I can say it with the likes of Bioshock Infinite and the worst case of the bunch, GTAIV.
If I hear a story about how people are shocked by how something reviewers hyped to be the second coming didn't come any where near close in reaching those expectations, I have to ask... ever heard the phrase "fool me once..."?
 
I am not usually the tinfoil hat wearing type, but I will cop to believing the game review industry is hopelessly corrupt. Seriously, how many times has this happened now?

1. Game comes out to universal reviewer acclaim.
2. Game turns out to have massive issues, whether from bugs or gameplay issues.
3. Backlash ensues.

This has happened going back to the 1980s. It's not hard to do the math.
corrupt isn't the right word

corruption requires awareness that one is doing wrong
 
I think some people are tired of Naughty Dog getting away with shoddy gameplay mechanics, just because they can put together a stellar presentation. Presentation is important, sure, but this is still a game.
 
Plus it's very disingenuous to hate on GTAIV years after it released. At the time, it was pretty amazing. We'd not seen that kind of detail in an open world game before. Now there are many carbon copies.

Reviewers give their opinion immediately after having played the game. If anyone thought GTAIV was shit immediately after playing it on release, I'd guess those people would be in a mental institution by now.

There was more than enough sneering at GTA IV's muddy graphics, car/3rd-person handling and cutscenes when it first came out. Plenty of people called out Half-Life 2's Day 1 reviews for poor AI, Steam problems, stuttering, and limp gunplay. Half Life 1's final 3rd was widely despised at the time, even by the "professionals". Bioshock had legions of forum critics on release. Feel free to keep banging that drum though.
 
Dunno, wait and see, this threads always gives me headache because all the contrary opinions that everyone has in comparasion with other games.

Keep the expectations in check people.
 
1) Who were those people that criticized it a month after release? How many were there that did that?

2) Did game reviewers have a month with GTAIV before writing up their reviews, or was it probably about a week or less?

All I'm saying is that it's easy to look back on the game's faults now (i.e. the constant cell phone harassment to go on dates with your cousin), but at the time the game was pretty
amazing.
It just sounds like you were excited there was a news GTA game and ignored all of it's faults at the time. A lot of my friends had the same reaction. They brought it over my house and I played through the first few missions and decided that I didn't think it was a good game and all my friends there thought I was crazy.

I've talked about it with them more recently and they all agree its not as good as they thought it was on release.
 
OP is just attention seeking, there has been no major backlash or negativity surrounding the game.

Better luck next time :/
 
My main complaint besides the annoying as hell autosave bug (losing progress sucks) is that... when you are trying to stealth through an area and going slowly, the people with you get in your way constantly. It's like they intentionally run in front of you then stop so you have to go around them. :(
 
I've already beaten the game.
I have slight issues with:
Frame rate - dips in places
Image quality - bad in some places, especially when you throw a molotov
Input lag - slight issues there, nothing gamebreaking

Issues that are there but I don't really have a problem:
Friendly AI not being detected - it's frankly for the best, because the friendly AI isn't great
Combat repetition - stealthily killing everything can be boring, but that's not how to enjoy the game imo.

The real meat of the game is not really the stealth combat, it's when you fuck up the stealth, and all shit breaks loose. The character models are brilliant and the story is very well written, and it sums up to be a glorious experience.

Is there any significant difference from normal to hard mode? Sometimes I get the feeling that this game should've gone the "dark souls" approach and have "hard" as the standard difficulty.
 
There was more than enough sneering at GTA IV's muddy graphics, car/3rd-person handling and cutscenes when it first came out. Plenty of people called out Half-Life 2's Day 1 reviews for poor AI, Steam problems, stuttering, and limp gunplay. Half Life 1's final 3rd was widely despised at the time, even by the "professionals". Bioshock had legions of forum critics on release. Feel free to keep banging that drum though.

I think what you're pointing to is a very vocal minority. The silent majority enjoyed those games.
 
And thus gaf search for a perfect game continues.



this Citizen Kane is really turning out to be a white whale.

It's almost like looking purely at story/narrative presentation in games is gonna end up in disappoint every time because that was never gaming's strong point.
 
People expect perfection. They don't get it and they lose their mind.

Bugs and glitches definitely need to be fixed, but other complains are what make them games i.e. no game has a perfect A.I.
 
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