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I’ve seen some anons on community forums and mainstream social media sites like Reddit, YouTube or 4chan suggest the story wouldn’t have gotten as much backlash if it started off with Abby and not when players would hate her the most. I don’t believe that’s wrong, but I don’t think the story and the experience would’ve been better as a result.
It was clear on druckmanns end that starting off with Abby right after Jessie gets shot was fully intentional, and was supposed to piss off the player. The entire first half of the game is specifically setup to get you to hate Abby as much as possible, having it suddenly transition to her perspective at such a specific moment would be considered suicidal by any other director if that wasn’t the goal. By having the story start off with Ellie, a character the fan base already connected with and ending off with her resolution with Joel, the story feels more closely connected to her as a character and Abbys impact on her. Letting the game conclude with Ellie stating how she felt about Joel’s actions and then not being able to state what she wanted to do with her relationship with him at the same period when Ellie is moving on with her life past Abby makes it way easier to understand not just why she was so angry, but how she was such in a miserable state of mind well past the death of Joel. It’s not just the fact that Joel died horribly, it’s the fact that he died at a point in her life where she wasn’t able to let him know that she forgave him and wanted to make sure he wasn’t completely abondoned by those that loved him during what were his final days. If the game introduced abbys arc just after that, it wouldn’t have hit right. I wouldn’t have felt as angry, I wouldn’t have as much of an understanding of Ellie as a character, I wouldn’t have been as open to understanding the conditions required for Abby to even go after Joel to start. Obviously the way the game was paced pissed the living shit out of so many players, but I think it was a risk worth taking if it meant getting a new, and in my own opinion, thoughtful and experimental way of concluding a character arc.
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>>29857Yeah Bethesda games are pretty bad about this kind of stuff. At best if you are playing a character with Illusion skill you can cast Fear on NPCs and watch them run away or they'll extremely rarely do it when beaten down to an inch, but making an NPC yield unconditionally is pretty much impossible in vanilla at least.
>>29862Stealthy pacifist walkthroughs are an option, but like I said it barely affects the storytelling here in any way and it makes the dissonance even more jarring because it still acts out as if you fought your way through. Contrast this for example with Deus Ex, where taking the stealth/pacifist route during levels opened different story paths, affected the dialogue, character disposition etc. If it did affect the storytelling and its outcomes then I would commend it, but as it is the point of the mechanic here in this context falls flat beyond letting you not waste precious resources by avoiding combat.
>>29895I feel like the issue extends to how the game was set up. ND did a lot of things with uncharted and the last of us, but one thing that was consistent was how linear their games are. It’s not just the fact that we’re playing a story based game, but a series focusing specifically on one or a few protagonists. Other story based games like dying light, gta, what you mentioned, deus ex, undertale, and more can have branches to their stories, but that only works because their isn’t one character in focus for multiple games. If NDs major entries had that kind of non linearity to their stories to fix the dissonance, it would be a lot harder to write a coherent storyline between games without constant retconning, or plots that converge towards the same outcome regardless of the players actual inputs with slight modifications to dialogue(cough cough telltale)
>>29898>Oh, man, if I could just push a button and kill all these people that committed this horrible act, I would make them feel the same pain that they inflicted on these people.saying this specifically in reference to Palestinians lynching IDF soldiers is just about peak irony, wow
>>29899Imagine if he was referring to the Israelis from a Palestinian perspective