T w e n t y S i d e d

I think I’ll steal some commentary from tomorrow’s episode and bring this up now: How many guys live in Pittsburgh? We must kill 50 or so on our way through. Either we are so unlucky that in this vast city we somehow blunder into the only inhabited buildings, or we’re only seeing a fraction of the inhabitants.

Let’s split the difference and say there’s a only hundred dudesOr were, before we showed up.. If they ganked an entire family every single day, and every family had a week worth of food, these raiders would starve to death in a hurryAssume a “family” is five people, then each car has 35 daily rations, while Raidertown needs 100.. And it’s pretty clear they don’t get nearly a carload of rubes a day. This is the same stupidity we saw in Fallout 3: Raiders cannot outnumber civilians. Ever. Every dude we encounter makes the entire world that much less plausible.

That initial raider attack by six guys was barely tolerable. But this is Planet Sillypants. We’ve got hundreds of guys, spread evenly throughout the buildings, many of them on the second floor. These idiots aren’t going to find any travelers to rob on the second floor of an office building. They’re not doing any useful work. They’re not amusing themselves like a group of perpetually bored men might. No, they’re sprinkled around like DOOM imps and cacodemons – mindless monsters waiting to attack the player.

If the roads are busy with constant traffic with people moving from town to town, then the existence of a hundred raiders in Pittsburgh should be common knowledge. If travel is rare and towns are isolated, then these morons starved to death years ago.

If this section had been limited to the initial ambush and one of the adjoining buildings, then I could give it a pass. But why, in this ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE game, are we shooting at so many human beingsYeah, I know why. “Because it’s a videogame”!? This is preposterous, and we’re only halfway through Pittsburgh.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So I guess now we’re duty-bound to come up with more euphemisms for toilet paper. Do your best!

The game improves so much the moment we rejoin Ellie. I think one of the reasons that I can tolerate Joel being a heel is that we aren’t given any agency at all over his actions. If the game gave you a BioWare / TellTale style dialog choice once in a while, or offered you a “Press X to punch Bill in the face, square to give him a high-five”, then we’d resent all the other occasions where the game didn’t give us a choice. Being offered meaningless choices is more annoying than having no choices at all.

I suppose it also helps that we have a character-based reason for Joel’s behavior. We can see he’s wrong, but he’s wrong because of personal problems that are central to his character. He’s not just denying her a gun because the game designers didn’t think it would work from a gameplay perspective.

If I can bring up Mass Effect 2 without opening old woundsActually, those wounds never closed. But whatever. then it provides a good contrast. Shepard makes TONS of galaxy-changing decisions, so us not being able to refuse to work with The Illusive ManThere are some who call him… TIM? feels really out of place. Worse, he doesn’t have a reason that works for usOkay, it works for some players.. He’s enslaved by the plot, which means we’re enslaved by the plot, which means all those other little choices feel frustrating and condescending. Like, I can’t refuse to work with this crazy terrorist moron, but I’m allowed to be a dick to Veetor for no reason.

Because of this difference, Joel’s reluctance to give Ellie a firearm feels like narrative tension and not railroading. And when he finally breaks down and trusts her to protect him, we understand he’s taking a huge step. It’s entirely possible this is the first positive step he’s taken in 20 years to cope with his daughter’s murder.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.