EatinOlives
Member
Please bear with me for a longass post because I really want to go over some terrible gameplay I've been experiencing.
First time playing through Last of Us on PS4. I've been playing it on Survivor since I was in the mood for a stealth game and nearly everywhere I've read on GAF they always talk about turning off the Listen Mode and whatnot.
I gotta be honest guys, this game's just not that great to me. I'm in the Pittsburgh chapter and it's just really boring human enemy encounter after enemy encounter with your bog standard chest-high walls/desks/turned over shelves/etc. There's always some dumb annoyance with the game. Yesterday I was experiencing some really dumb enemy encounter design. I was in the hotel basement and was attacked by a bloater and you have to use a keykard to escape...apparently you HAVE to try opening the door first before you can use the keycard even if you already have the keykard. I died several times trying to swipe the keykard first and the game never let me. Why?? Why waste my time with a bunch of zombies on my ass about to eat my face? Why does the game respawn me in really terrible locations after a death especially right before I prep with crafting a few things and using a health pack, meaning I have to do the same dumb things over and over and over again with each try?
Today was just more annoyance. The enemy AI while in stealth is pretty bad. I'm at the encounter where Ellie uses a gun for the first time to cover Joel while he goes around choking dudes. I start off doing my thing but notice there's a whole bunch of dudes swarming the area, and furthermore I notice that no matter how stealthy I am the dudes just HAPPEN to walk exactly where I'm walking and I get spotted and killed multiple times. What the fuck. I decide to change up my tactics and go for the lone gunman up at the second floor on the other side of the map since he gave me trouble the last couple of tries. I go into an adjacent coffee shop looking for stairs and find the back room and inside the back room is another food closet in the corner where there's a note. I begin to skim it thinking I'm safe since I'm waaaay off to a corner and far from the dudes...except a second later a dude just randomly shows up, I get spotted, and killed. What the fuck? How did he even know to look in here? At this time during every other try all the dudes where in the other side of the map where I was! The next try I ignore that note and just find my way to the second floor directly, and I choke the sniper dude on that second floor. I retreat to the office just behind that dude and look around and notice that there's a fucking guy who just happens to go up to the second floor to "discover" this dude's body. In the 20 minutes I've been on this encounter not a single dude has ever joined Sniper Dude in the second floor. At this point I'm 99% certain the game just likes to "direct" dudes to where you are completely regardless as to whether or not you're playing stealthily. This "dude" who is "just investigating" "just happens" to jump into the office where I am to check things out. I sneak behind him and choke him. Not two seconds later, another dude just "happens" to "check things out" in the second floor! Holy shit, the game really DOES force the AI to your location regardless if you're stealthily hidden or not! I choke that guy too. Then another guy does the exact same thing! I kill the entire cavalcade of dudes just by waiting them out because I know that the AI just has them "wander" into exactly where my location is. It's not only easily exploitable, it's extremely cheap that the game has the AI constantly follow you even when you're completely stealthed. At least I exploited the shitty AI to my advantage.
The shittiness doesn't stop there. I got into an area that was booby trapped with a couple of dudes on talking on the second floor. I go to the second floor, choke Dude 1, and unfortunately screw up trying to choke Dude 2. OK, that's cool. But then I respawn in the middle of the room right behind the desk where I choked Dude 1. OK, that must mean the game autosaved right after choking Dude 1, so I only have to worry about Dude 2. I mean it's weird the game would autosave right in the middle of the encounter when the rest of the game it always dumped me right back to the beginning (sometimes making me lose 5-10 minutes of gameplay, annoying in its own right). But whatever. Except Dude 1's body is completely gone. Huh? Then not one second later I hear the "omg you're being spotted!" rumble even though Dude 2 is walking away from me. Turns out Dude 1 is CLIMBING THE STAIRS from the first floor behind me and spotted me. WTF? Why would the game just teleport Dude 1 across a floor? Then while trying to melee Dude 1 to death the entire level's geometry just disappears and flickers on and off while I'm hitting him. Then I'm done and flickering disappears, and I go to Dude 2 in the second floor and he's just standing there, back against the wall, staring right in my direction. So I wait thinking it's part of his dumb generic Bad Guy in Stealth Game patrol path. Nope. I'm there for like 2 minutes straight while this guy stands completely still staring out into the abyss. Fuck it, I just throw a brick at him and beat his head in. All the noise alerted a few guys, right? Nope, the dudes next to the tanks out in the first street heard nothing. In fact, they too are completely still and don't move at all staring into nothing! Yay the AI is bugged. Maybe I can slip past them and into the next part because fuck the stealth in this game. Except I look and look and look and there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go. I'm beyond frustrated at this point so I just look up a guide and apparently I have to kill every person in the area before I get a prompt to prop Ellie up to a fire escape ladder. Just another exercise in frustration, wherein the game doesn't tell you at all whether you have to kill everyone or whether you can simply sneak past them. I get past this area by killing everyone and get to the part where I have to sneak past the humvee with the mounted minigun before I stop playing for the day.
These past few days I can't help but think the game is massively overrated. The wall of text I wrote is just a small sampler of my general experience with the game. AI bugs out, AI does cheap shit, the game constantly puts up "point of no return" walls behind you so you can't ever go back to shiv doors in case you finally get enough shit to craft a shiv, I hate how 99% of all drawers and closets in the game are absolutely empty (why does like to waste my time like this?) Enemies wildly jump between "fucking idiots who can't spot me even though I'm sneaking literally in front of them" and "superhuman beings who always just HAPPEN to walk to exactly where I am regardless of where I am despite me being stealthed", it's just a pure exercise in frustration.
It's really too bad that the gameplay is terrible because I've really liked Uncharted games and I think the story in this game is pretty good. I'm just gonna drop the difficulty to Normal or whatever the fuck, I'm thinking the people praising the Survivor/Grounded modes already played through the game at least once so they know exactly what to do, but for a first-timer like me I have to say a lot of the game design is really bad, IMO. My experience has been far from fun.
I've never heard anyone badmouth the gameplay before, though. Has anyone else had this same experience or is my copy just fucked up for some reason?
First time playing through Last of Us on PS4. I've been playing it on Survivor since I was in the mood for a stealth game and nearly everywhere I've read on GAF they always talk about turning off the Listen Mode and whatnot.
I gotta be honest guys, this game's just not that great to me. I'm in the Pittsburgh chapter and it's just really boring human enemy encounter after enemy encounter with your bog standard chest-high walls/desks/turned over shelves/etc. There's always some dumb annoyance with the game. Yesterday I was experiencing some really dumb enemy encounter design. I was in the hotel basement and was attacked by a bloater and you have to use a keykard to escape...apparently you HAVE to try opening the door first before you can use the keycard even if you already have the keykard. I died several times trying to swipe the keykard first and the game never let me. Why?? Why waste my time with a bunch of zombies on my ass about to eat my face? Why does the game respawn me in really terrible locations after a death especially right before I prep with crafting a few things and using a health pack, meaning I have to do the same dumb things over and over and over again with each try?
Today was just more annoyance. The enemy AI while in stealth is pretty bad. I'm at the encounter where Ellie uses a gun for the first time to cover Joel while he goes around choking dudes. I start off doing my thing but notice there's a whole bunch of dudes swarming the area, and furthermore I notice that no matter how stealthy I am the dudes just HAPPEN to walk exactly where I'm walking and I get spotted and killed multiple times. What the fuck. I decide to change up my tactics and go for the lone gunman up at the second floor on the other side of the map since he gave me trouble the last couple of tries. I go into an adjacent coffee shop looking for stairs and find the back room and inside the back room is another food closet in the corner where there's a note. I begin to skim it thinking I'm safe since I'm waaaay off to a corner and far from the dudes...except a second later a dude just randomly shows up, I get spotted, and killed. What the fuck? How did he even know to look in here? At this time during every other try all the dudes where in the other side of the map where I was! The next try I ignore that note and just find my way to the second floor directly, and I choke the sniper dude on that second floor. I retreat to the office just behind that dude and look around and notice that there's a fucking guy who just happens to go up to the second floor to "discover" this dude's body. In the 20 minutes I've been on this encounter not a single dude has ever joined Sniper Dude in the second floor. At this point I'm 99% certain the game just likes to "direct" dudes to where you are completely regardless as to whether or not you're playing stealthily. This "dude" who is "just investigating" "just happens" to jump into the office where I am to check things out. I sneak behind him and choke him. Not two seconds later, another dude just "happens" to "check things out" in the second floor! Holy shit, the game really DOES force the AI to your location regardless if you're stealthily hidden or not! I choke that guy too. Then another guy does the exact same thing! I kill the entire cavalcade of dudes just by waiting them out because I know that the AI just has them "wander" into exactly where my location is. It's not only easily exploitable, it's extremely cheap that the game has the AI constantly follow you even when you're completely stealthed. At least I exploited the shitty AI to my advantage.
The shittiness doesn't stop there. I got into an area that was booby trapped with a couple of dudes on talking on the second floor. I go to the second floor, choke Dude 1, and unfortunately screw up trying to choke Dude 2. OK, that's cool. But then I respawn in the middle of the room right behind the desk where I choked Dude 1. OK, that must mean the game autosaved right after choking Dude 1, so I only have to worry about Dude 2. I mean it's weird the game would autosave right in the middle of the encounter when the rest of the game it always dumped me right back to the beginning (sometimes making me lose 5-10 minutes of gameplay, annoying in its own right). But whatever. Except Dude 1's body is completely gone. Huh? Then not one second later I hear the "omg you're being spotted!" rumble even though Dude 2 is walking away from me. Turns out Dude 1 is CLIMBING THE STAIRS from the first floor behind me and spotted me. WTF? Why would the game just teleport Dude 1 across a floor? Then while trying to melee Dude 1 to death the entire level's geometry just disappears and flickers on and off while I'm hitting him. Then I'm done and flickering disappears, and I go to Dude 2 in the second floor and he's just standing there, back against the wall, staring right in my direction. So I wait thinking it's part of his dumb generic Bad Guy in Stealth Game patrol path. Nope. I'm there for like 2 minutes straight while this guy stands completely still staring out into the abyss. Fuck it, I just throw a brick at him and beat his head in. All the noise alerted a few guys, right? Nope, the dudes next to the tanks out in the first street heard nothing. In fact, they too are completely still and don't move at all staring into nothing! Yay the AI is bugged. Maybe I can slip past them and into the next part because fuck the stealth in this game. Except I look and look and look and there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go. I'm beyond frustrated at this point so I just look up a guide and apparently I have to kill every person in the area before I get a prompt to prop Ellie up to a fire escape ladder. Just another exercise in frustration, wherein the game doesn't tell you at all whether you have to kill everyone or whether you can simply sneak past them. I get past this area by killing everyone and get to the part where I have to sneak past the humvee with the mounted minigun before I stop playing for the day.
These past few days I can't help but think the game is massively overrated. The wall of text I wrote is just a small sampler of my general experience with the game. AI bugs out, AI does cheap shit, the game constantly puts up "point of no return" walls behind you so you can't ever go back to shiv doors in case you finally get enough shit to craft a shiv, I hate how 99% of all drawers and closets in the game are absolutely empty (why does like to waste my time like this?) Enemies wildly jump between "fucking idiots who can't spot me even though I'm sneaking literally in front of them" and "superhuman beings who always just HAPPEN to walk to exactly where I am regardless of where I am despite me being stealthed", it's just a pure exercise in frustration.
It's really too bad that the gameplay is terrible because I've really liked Uncharted games and I think the story in this game is pretty good. I'm just gonna drop the difficulty to Normal or whatever the fuck, I'm thinking the people praising the Survivor/Grounded modes already played through the game at least once so they know exactly what to do, but for a first-timer like me I have to say a lot of the game design is really bad, IMO. My experience has been far from fun.
I've never heard anyone badmouth the gameplay before, though. Has anyone else had this same experience or is my copy just fucked up for some reason?
I definitely think I encountered the bolded in that last little anecdote of mine in the OP. The game deciding to relocate an enemy across a floor after I respawned had me like "what the fuck is going on in this game?""
