(Winner of "Most Hated Award" for most hated game of the year, speech below)
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. For three console generations, Naughty Dog established themselves as frontrunners of both ground-breaking technical achievements and cinematic mastery. However, while The Last of Us made quite the splash when it dropped towards the end of the PS3’s life, the praise it received was largely directed towards its story and graphics, NOT gameplay.
Riding the tail end of the “zombie survival” trend, The Last of Us earned a slew of praise, and a mountain of awards, in large part due to Naughty Dog's attention to detail: through subtle world building and visual storytelling, they delivered an affecting character drama set against the backdrop of a gritty, depressing world that made everyone feel like shit. In other words: it was the vidya-equivalent of Oscar bait.
Seven years later, however, Neil Druckmann managed to go a step beyond making us feel just how horrible their world was by… making us feel just how horrible their world was. Just, you know, in a different, unintended way. In the end of this 25-hour slog of self-induced misery, Druckmann’s penchant for torture porn really put the player in quite an uncomfortable position, one that could only have been even more awkward for the developers who had to sit there recreating the company-mandated Liveleak gore videos he probably emailed around the office. “Check out this manga,” Neil probably texted the mocap director, who had been awake for 35 hours at that point, “at the end, a dude puts her baby in a blender lmao.”
While The Last of Us as a series has never really been defined by its gameplay, at least the sequel has a solid story and well-written characters to fall back on, right? Well, what do you get when you take a game with mediocre gameplay and a great story and strip away the story while simultaneously taking a dump all over the original? You get… this. A game that sits you down and shovels an entire day of misery down your throat with no payoff. A game that goes out of its way to destroy the main appeal of its predecessor. A game that sets up the most hateable character imaginable, and then forces you into her shoes for the next ten hours. A game that revels in making you do horrible things and then chastises you for doing them. A game that /v/ voted the most hated game of 2020.
So to Neil and his three remaining employees, good job. Add this award to your pile, you didn’t even have to pay for this one.
(Winner of "Scrappy Doo Award" for Worst Character (Abby), speech below)
You guys must really have hated this game. I mean, the top three choices were all from The Last of Us. But you picked Abbey out amongst the crowd, so perhaps we should sit down and analyze that. What is it about her that stands out?
Well, look, I know you guys don’t care about e-celebs, let’s just discuss one single quote from Yahtzee: “This game is about shitty people taking the most irrational course of action.” Now, Abby does a lot of senseless killing and violence, like Ellie, that elevates her to at least a sociopathic state. But Joel killed a lot of people too, so what’s the real problem here? Well, it’s two things; first impressions and sympathy.
Our first impressions of Joel and Ellie were more about understanding what made them tick and their general reasoning, so we could grow to understand them and why they did what they did and made a lot of selfish actions. Abby’s first impression was taking Joel to the driving range in the sky, which immediately makes her public enemy number one in the player’s mind.
Getting back to the second issue at hand, Naughty Dog tries (and fails) to force us to understand Abbey’s logic and reasoning. Even when throwing us into her shoes, we’re still left dumbfounded what on earth would cause her to behave the way she does. She never even stops to reflect upon her actions, or tries to understand the consequences of them, like Joel did in the first game. This isn’t irrational hatred, it’s common fucking sense to dislike psychopathic maniacs.
Look, we’ve ranted long enough. You could write a college thesis on attempting to decipher what in the hell Neil was trying to make us think when writing her character, but any attempt at a serious analysis is just going to get you labelled a “hater” or something stupid on his Twitter, so we won’t bother. She’s a fucking joke of a character, end of discussion.
(Winner of "Pottery Award" for worst writing/story, speech below)
As if straight out of an entry-level college course, Druckmann and his team set out to create the most uninspired revenge plot possible. Naughty Dog started this endeavor by retconning the previous game’s writing, and using that retcon to set up possibly the most hateable character of all time. Then they make you play as them, and in exchange, sets up the previous character you played as yet another “most-hateable” character of all time. Then makes you play as them again.
Like, we get what you were going for, Neil, we do. You wanted to show that deaths aren’t always glorious. You wanted to show the gritty, savage nature of humanity when survival and revenge are on the table. But you didn’t set up two characters with unique stories and motivations, you set up two absolutely unlikeable bitches that we want nothing to do with, then gave them both an entourage of obnoxious pests to follow them around like a swarm of mosquitoes you just can’t escape from.
In your attempts to portray the raw, unbridled fury of humanity, Neil, you managed to forget possibly the most important aspect to video games: we pay $60 for these fucking things, we want to come home and unwind for a few hours and have some fun. Why would we ever pay that much money just to be miserable? There’s not even a payoff! Like, honestly, what did you expect?
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. For three console generations, Naughty Dog established themselves as frontrunners of both ground-breaking technical achievements and cinematic mastery. However, while The Last of Us made quite the splash when it dropped towards the end of the PS3’s life, the praise it received was largely directed towards its story and graphics, NOT gameplay.
Riding the tail end of the “zombie survival” trend, The Last of Us earned a slew of praise, and a mountain of awards, in large part due to Naughty Dog's attention to detail: through subtle world building and visual storytelling, they delivered an affecting character drama set against the backdrop of a gritty, depressing world that made everyone feel like shit. In other words: it was the vidya-equivalent of Oscar bait.
Seven years later, however, Neil Druckmann managed to go a step beyond making us feel just how horrible their world was by… making us feel just how horrible their world was. Just, you know, in a different, unintended way. In the end of this 25-hour slog of self-induced misery, Druckmann’s penchant for torture porn really put the player in quite an uncomfortable position, one that could only have been even more awkward for the developers who had to sit there recreating the company-mandated Liveleak gore videos he probably emailed around the office. “Check out this manga,” Neil probably texted the mocap director, who had been awake for 35 hours at that point, “at the end, a dude puts her baby in a blender lmao.”
While The Last of Us as a series has never really been defined by its gameplay, at least the sequel has a solid story and well-written characters to fall back on, right? Well, what do you get when you take a game with mediocre gameplay and a great story and strip away the story while simultaneously taking a dump all over the original? You get… this. A game that sits you down and shovels an entire day of misery down your throat with no payoff. A game that goes out of its way to destroy the main appeal of its predecessor. A game that sets up the most hateable character imaginable, and then forces you into her shoes for the next ten hours. A game that revels in making you do horrible things and then chastises you for doing them. A game that /v/ voted the most hated game of 2020.
So to Neil and his three remaining employees, good job. Add this award to your pile, you didn’t even have to pay for this one.
(Winner of "Scrappy Doo Award" for Worst Character (Abby), speech below)
You guys must really have hated this game. I mean, the top three choices were all from The Last of Us. But you picked Abbey out amongst the crowd, so perhaps we should sit down and analyze that. What is it about her that stands out?
Well, look, I know you guys don’t care about e-celebs, let’s just discuss one single quote from Yahtzee: “This game is about shitty people taking the most irrational course of action.” Now, Abby does a lot of senseless killing and violence, like Ellie, that elevates her to at least a sociopathic state. But Joel killed a lot of people too, so what’s the real problem here? Well, it’s two things; first impressions and sympathy.
Our first impressions of Joel and Ellie were more about understanding what made them tick and their general reasoning, so we could grow to understand them and why they did what they did and made a lot of selfish actions. Abby’s first impression was taking Joel to the driving range in the sky, which immediately makes her public enemy number one in the player’s mind.
Getting back to the second issue at hand, Naughty Dog tries (and fails) to force us to understand Abbey’s logic and reasoning. Even when throwing us into her shoes, we’re still left dumbfounded what on earth would cause her to behave the way she does. She never even stops to reflect upon her actions, or tries to understand the consequences of them, like Joel did in the first game. This isn’t irrational hatred, it’s common fucking sense to dislike psychopathic maniacs.
Look, we’ve ranted long enough. You could write a college thesis on attempting to decipher what in the hell Neil was trying to make us think when writing her character, but any attempt at a serious analysis is just going to get you labelled a “hater” or something stupid on his Twitter, so we won’t bother. She’s a fucking joke of a character, end of discussion.
(Winner of "Pottery Award" for worst writing/story, speech below)
As if straight out of an entry-level college course, Druckmann and his team set out to create the most uninspired revenge plot possible. Naughty Dog started this endeavor by retconning the previous game’s writing, and using that retcon to set up possibly the most hateable character of all time. Then they make you play as them, and in exchange, sets up the previous character you played as yet another “most-hateable” character of all time. Then makes you play as them again.
Like, we get what you were going for, Neil, we do. You wanted to show that deaths aren’t always glorious. You wanted to show the gritty, savage nature of humanity when survival and revenge are on the table. But you didn’t set up two characters with unique stories and motivations, you set up two absolutely unlikeable bitches that we want nothing to do with, then gave them both an entourage of obnoxious pests to follow them around like a swarm of mosquitoes you just can’t escape from.
In your attempts to portray the raw, unbridled fury of humanity, Neil, you managed to forget possibly the most important aspect to video games: we pay $60 for these fucking things, we want to come home and unwind for a few hours and have some fun. Why would we ever pay that much money just to be miserable? There’s not even a payoff! Like, honestly, what did you expect?
thephilosopher
1 year ago
Given /v/'s combination of forced contrarianism and bad taste, that's almost an endorsement.