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Hola.

I just spent the past four hours making this TLOU2 trailer in the style of ‘Dunkirk (2017) Trailer 1’. It’d be nice if you could give it a watch. Or don’t.

Just a warning: The Last of Us: Part II is an 18+ rated post-apocalyptic survival game. The video contains video game violence. If you’re too young to be watching that, or you don’t want to see that, don’t press play.

Oh, and if you’ve never played the first game (I thoroughly recommend) and are planning to, this video contains spoilers for it. So don’t watch either smh



I’ll probably make a video about my aquarium or something within the next few weeks, so I’ll throw that in here too.

Dope.
That's dope.

Isn't that the game that was leaked? (Or something of that nature?)

It was just released a few days ago, and apparently, according to user reviews, it flopped. My sister is really sad about it

Oh man... I hope it flopped because of it not being "up to expectations" rather than people "review bombing it" just because it was leaked before the release. :\

It was due to be released in May 2020, but was delayed in March. A disgruntled former employee then leaked about 90% of the game and exposed Naughty Dog’s disgusting workplace practices.

It’s a combination of both. The game is phenomenal gameplay-wise and takes all the good of the first game and expands and improves upon it; but story-wise they... seem to have looked at what made the first game’s story great, decided to do the complete opposite, and its ending also didn’t stick the landing. They also straight up destroyed a chunk of the characterisation they spent the entire last game building up, and there’s a BIG SPOILER THING that happens in the first two hours that was handled awfully and people are mad about. The best scenes from the game are flashbacks to events just after the first game. It lives in the shadow of this amazing game that people have spent the last seven years wanting a repeat of, and fails to live up to it.

With that said, I don’t think it’s a BAD game. It’s great. Just great - not mediocre, not amazing. Part I is a 10/10, Part II is a 7/10. I’m kind of inclined to add a .5 just for the excellent melee and gun combat systems that both feel absolutely brutal.

Furthermore the game includes a trans character. Anti-LGBTQ+ groups are angry about that, pro-LGBTQ+ groups are angry because it’s an awful portrayal of a trans person.

That's interesting, the single review I read (upon seeing this thread and being curious when it was released) didn't mention the gameplay at all, but remarked how the script had been written and directed by a proper writer and director, and that it was very good.

The biggest Dutch online store accidentally mailed it out three days early to some preorderers.

I've heard about some of the drama behind this game but never understood it (mainly since I try to avoid drama), but I'm just hoping people can move on from this soon enough.

LGBTQ person here to say that
it BE like that.
When non LGBTQ storytellers want to be inclusive but they don't know how, and they don't take the time to consult anyone who is actually a part of the community.
I'm gonna have to look into how this was executed but I'm afraid it's going to be hard to watch
Anyway that's my two cents, sorry to get semi-controversial lol

In a Discord server, and I see these in the #memes channels.

I hope that the game legit earned a bad score, rather than people "review bombing" it just because of the leaks.

holy crap, to be worse than the legally worst game in video game history!

Nah hahahahaha the Metacritic score is 100% review bombing. The game’s story is executed stupidly and misunderstands what made the first game amazing, but the gameplay alone is great and the first half of the story still has its moments (the second half is indefensibly awful). It’s definitely nowhere near as bad as Sonic 06 or E.T.

Damn, that 95% critics score though. I haven't looked too far into Metascores for video games, but when a movie gets 95 on Metacritic, that's a huge deal.

The games in the 95 review score are so few and far between you can actually list them - only five games in the last ten years have made it there and only four other games in the last ten years have made it beyond 95. There were hundreds of great games released over the last decade but only ten have scored that high.

Baldur’s Gate II (2000), The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (2000), GTA: Vice City (2002), GTA: San Andreas (2004), Halo 2 (2004), LittleBigPlanet (2008), Red Dead Redemption (2010), Portal 2 (2011), The Last of Us (2013), Metal Gear Solid V (2015), The Last of Us: Part II (2020)

Majora’s Mask, GTA: Vice City + San Andreas, LittleBigPlanet, Portal 2, and The Last of Us are all regarded as classics and the best games of all time, moreso than many of the games that actually managed to get to 98/100 - regarded as technically impressive at the time and netted high scores because of that, but don’t hold up twenty years later/were memorable in the long term. It’s a big deal.

Yeah, that's interesting to see, but almost certainly resulting from bile and not genuine reviews.

ngl I am guilty of review bombing, but I believe it's justified in my case because paid mods, Bethesda, are you serious??

I got interested in where everything went wrong with The Last of Us: Part II and did some digging, because it was so mindboggling to me that the same developers released Uncharted 4, a GREAT game, just four years ago - and the original TLOU seven years ago - and yet this game fell flat on its face.

Naughty Dog is a dying developer studio. That’s it.

Neil Druckmann rose through the ranks of Naughty Dog between 2004 and 2009, landing his first big role as the creative director of The Last of Us alongside Bruce Straley, with a seasoned development team. The Last of Us was released in 2013 to universal critical and commercial success, becoming one of the best-selling games of all time.

Naughty Dog then decided to make Uncharted 4, which was released in 2016. During its development, a HUGE chunk of the development team who worked on The Last of Us were fired, and after its release the rest of them were forced out. Bruce Straley, the director of The Last of Us, resigned from the company in 2017. Druckmann succeeded him in all of the positions he left behind, including as the director of The Last of Us: Part II. When TLOU2 entered development and its story was complete, it was being developed by an entirely different developer team to the first game and Druckmann had nobody to tell him “hey, don’t do that, do this”, because he was basically writing the story as a solo project - exactly what happened to George Lucas with the Star Wars prequels.

Naughty Dog’s executives then forced the developers who were working on TLOU2 to go into crunch time - when a game is unfinished but close to release, and game developers are forced to fulfil as many development goals as fast as possible, to the point where they stay at work overnight and sleep at their desk if they have to. Somebody got so sick of that that they just straight up leaked the entire game onto the internet months before release, which... isn’t a good sign of people being proud of or liking their project.

Paid mods? Oh boy, I can definitely see why people would be upset at this game and review bomb it then.

I'm not surprised. The Video Game industry has some very dirty business practices with employees. EA has the same issue, or so I've heard, with unpaid overtime and in some cases giving very small development windows for some games, and forcing developers to release unfinished and broken games.
Also, EA has a nasty habit of buying small game development studios and shutting them down, and I am forever salty about that.
There is some part of me that wants to be a game designer, or at least a game artist, but this kind of stuff is very off-putting.

Can we all take a moment to remember back in the early 2000s, and even late 90s, when EA was more respectable?