Yeah, the next morning she has to go on patrol, so it’s still that world, but they have power, they have movie nights, they have a community dance - we want to show a bit of what that life is like. “You get to see her have a bit of a normal teenage life. “Like in the first game, Ellie wonders about what teenagers had to deal with,” lead game designer Richard Cambier told me during E3. The Last of Us Part 2 shows us an Ellie five years older, living a relatively normal life in Jackson, Wyoming. Do you think she wouldn’t be just as brutal? Now think about all the things Ellie saw in that journey. He constantly rubs up against your decisions and does things you wouldn’t, because you are playing as a character - a very violent one with a violent past. You were just a passenger in the story of Joel, a man who lost everything 20 years ago and somehow survived in this world for two decades afterwards. In the first game, you were constantly being reminded that you were not the main character. Joel’s jaw being ripped off by a bloater is seared into my mind’s eye like a second-hand trauma. You can even see this ethos in how your enemies behave, where the strongest infected can kill you instantly, and brutally, as soon as they make contact with you. It is meant to give you whiplash, to put you on edge. The violence depicted in The Last of Us has always been shocking. Violence for survival, rather than rewards.
I think the reason it has seen so much pushback is this: we are so used to seeing incentivised violence in video games - killing for points - that we are shocked when we see dirty, grounded violence. It’s shockingly brutal and you can’t help but wince at what you’re seeing, but that is entirely the point. We see a man strung up on a tree before being disemboweled, his guts hanging out like a bloodied tapeworm. We see heroine Ellie jam a pick into someone’s forehead.
In the trailer for The Last of Us Part 2, we see someone stabbed in the neck and watch blood piss out of the gaping wound. String the murders together, boot them into spikes, pop a head from 500 metres, and upload your skills to YouTube so the world can see how cool you are. Rack up that combo meter with slick, consecutive kills. In fact, many reward you for murder, for killing stylishly. Plenty of games put physical conflict at their core. Violence has been an intrinsic part of video games ever since their conception because most games, at their core, are about beating someone else, whether that is the AI or another player. Watching the reaction to the latest trailer for The Last of Us Part 2 unfold, I wondered why everyone was so upset by its barbarity.
0 kommentar(er)
