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The Last of Us Part II - Dream Grounded Update

Umbral

Member
I have no illusions that this will happen or that we’ll get a Grounded update at all. If we do, I am willing to bet it will just be the standard enemy health/damage bump, increased scarcity, etc.

This is what I would love to see in a Grounded update that would make the game worth revisiting:

Realistic reload: If you reload before emptying a magazine, you discard those rounds. You can retrieve these rounds if you retrieve the magazine they are in. Reloading will also require input from the player. The magazine will be removed from the gun and timing button presses will reload each round. If the weapon is the pump shotgun or rifle, the same applies, but no magazine of course.​
Trauma: Bone breaks, bullet retrieval, bandaging, arrow removal. Falls from fairly high will fracture legs, slowing movement and decreasing max health temporarily until you can address the injury. Bullets will occasionally need to be fished out of the wounds they make. Player input will be required for bandaging beyond simply pressing R2.​
Silent Takedowns: These will require player input. Either timed button presses or stick movements. If you’re gonna make me watch a long animation each time, at least give me something to do. Skilled play will speed up the animation.​
No Listen Mode: Self-explanatory.​
No Upgrade Trees: Self-explanatory.​
Body Armor: This must be retrieved from downed WLF. These can absorb a lot of damage and last a good while.​
Two Weapon Limit: You can only carry a sidearm and a long gun. You can exchange weapons with downed enemies.​
Resources: The scarcity is the same as Survivor difficulty, but there is either no limit or an increased limit to the backpack. There’s no way that someone could only carry 12 bullets while carrying a normal backpack. Makes no sense. There will be no random Clif bars or candy bars in the world. Gunpowder will be added as a resource.​
Ammo: Ellie will need to make her own ammo in the field, either at a workstation or she will carry an ammo loader like Jill from Resident Evil 3. There is no way you would stumble across ammo 25+ years after the apocalypse. Abby, being WLF, will not need to do this. She can load up on ammo from the bases. Maybe give her an ammo pouch to represent this. This eliminates the need to search for ammo in the world. You can, however, retrieve ammunition from downed enemies. Enemies will run out of ammo too, so they have a set amount. If you kill them before they are out, you can retrieve it.​
Melee Weapons: These last longer or are permanent and they no longer need to be augmented with parts.​
Gyro Aiming: Self-explanatory.​
No companions: This will only be available after you’ve beaten the game and they will still appear for necessary scenes such as the Jesse truck scene.​

These are ideas I’ve been thinking about since I started the game and have been mulling them over for a while now. I’m open to criticism or other ideas. I think it’s a fun exercise to think about ways I would change or fix a game’s mechanics. What say you?
 

Hostile_18

Banned
Personally I think that would slow the game down to a crawl and make it more tedious than fun.

I just don't think you can make everything too realistic. For example all the enemies should be dying with plenty of bullets the rate they fire them at you but if they did you'd be over powered.

I think the no listen mode is a given. I'd like stealth to be a little less forgiving to make the challenge harder. My main thing though is I don't want upgrade parts to be scarcer as I'm intending my grounded playthrough to be the one where I get my last two trophies for fully upgrading the weapons. If I didn't reach that goal on a second play through I'd be a bit frustrated.

Something like a VR mode would be AMAZING 😁 and more immersive to me.
 
They should add a mode with 10 times the amount of dogs present in the game and call it PETA mode.

Oh good grief, I was terrified of the dogs when I first encountered them. I learned later the easiest thing to do is barbecue them with molotovs*! Talk about hot dogs! Heh!

I would've loved the ability to tranq them, though. If that was an option, I would've made an effort to knock them out, rather than kill them.

(* - I'm actually an animal lover, wanted to be a vet when I was younger, and it was actually sad to see the dogs get upset when their handler is killed)
 
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Umbral

Member
Personally I think that would slow the game down to a crawl and make it more tedious than fun.
The idea is to make it more “grounded”, but also give the player more to do. The gameplay loop right now is kill > scavenge. The only changes we got to gameplay this time around was prone, dodge, and a jump button. There’s a lot of waiting in the game, like when searching drawers, cabinets, and when taking someone out silently. There could also maybe be some kind of input required if someone you grabbed tries to escape, instead of it just being a sure thing that they get away.

I just don't think you can make everything too realistic. For example all the enemies should be dying with plenty of bullets the rate they fire them at you but if they did you'd be over powered.
It would depend on the set amount each enemy is given for the encounter. If the developers gave an enemy two 15 round magazines for an encounter it would play out way different than giving them five 15 round magazines. Balance the ammo the enemy carries with the encounter. This would also incentivize taking them out silently as you’ll get all their ammo. If you end up in a firefight, then incentivizes aggressive play since you’ll want to take them out quickly to get more ammo. The enemy would also fire less blindly because they would be wasting their ammo. Just some thoughts on it.

I think the no listen mode is a given. I'd like stealth to be a little less forgiving to make the challenge harder. My main thing though is I don't want upgrade parts to be scarcer as I'm intending my grounded playthrough to be the one where I get my last two trophies for fully upgrading the weapons. If I didn't reach that goal on a second play through I'd be a bit frustrated.
Listen mode off should have been a default option at launch but they tied it into the upgrade trees, so it’s harder to remove. This is why I suggested just doing away with the upgrade trees and manuals. I didn’t know there was a trophy tied to this.

Something like a VR mode would be AMAZING 😁 and more immersive to me.
I don’t have VR yet, but I wonder what that would look like? I think they’d have to do it on PS5 only because they’d have to knock back the visuals significantly even on PS4 Pro to hit the frame rate targets.
 
Turn off listen mode outright and create more varying pathing for enemies to make it more difficult to follow who is where and where they're headed.

Otherwise, the design dream would be to force the player to adapt their approach and exercise all of their skillset, which can be achieved one of two ways: (1) limiting resources and/or abilities; or (2) altering encounter structure and AI. The second seems like too much work to realize, so fingers crossed they can figure out the former. I'd also be amenable to replenishing health as a consequence of fatigue (i.e. continuous drain) instead of allowing the player to just hoard health packs. The drain, however, would need to be slight, to try and simulate the notion that the game is not just a revenge story, but a fight to survive, even when you aren't engaged in combat.

You might as well add more enemies to certain sections, too (namely the parts involving the Infected).
 

THEAP99

Banned
im getting incredibly annoyed that they haven't updated the game at all since release. no new information on factions either
 

THEAP99

Banned
And still no option to disable film grain.
i would also like difficulty trophies and a permadeath mode. and also for them to talk about the multiplayer mode they're cooking up. communication is at an all-time low with them
 

xrnzaaas

Gold Member
im getting incredibly annoyed that they haven't updated the game at all since release. no new information on factions either
Yeah it's annoying, Ghost of Tsushima got the harder mode first despite being released a month later.
 

webber

Member
Fix this:
Brutes not dying with headshots.
Enemies having unlimited ammo until they fucking kill you and when you kill them they have -269 bullets.
Make supplies and ammo around the world just a bit more scarce.

The player and enemy aim is unforgiving as it is...
I wish dead enemies didn't disappear but I guess this is PS4's limitation.

Otherwise almost perfect gameplay.
 

Umbral

Member
im getting incredibly annoyed that they haven't updated the game at all since release. no new information on factions either
Factions will either be:

  1. An expansion of what it already was on PS3
  2. A wide open, battle royale type of game in the vein of Day Z/ PUBG
Considering how little they changed with the single player, I’m betting it’s the first. Though they did split it off and are working on it separately, so it could well be something more akin to the second one.
 

Azurro

Banned
They should add a hyper diversity mode. It dynamically replaces all characters with oppressed victims of your choosing. Set the mode to black, muslim, one legged trans mode, and all the characters will be swapped for those.

Because not all the woke modes are the same, they will also include the correct racist mode, where every character is a gender identity of your choosing as long as it's woman, with an optional butt plug accessory that will provide a boost in speed, every single enemy is a white straight dude because ewwww being straight. You get a congratulatory "You go girl! Let's take down the patriarchy!" voice recorded message by Neil Druckmann while being sodomized every time you kill a white, straight enemy. :p
 
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Blond

Banned
They should add a hyper diversity mode. It dynamically replaces all characters with oppressed victims of your choosing. Set the mode to black, muslim, one legged trans mode, and all the characters will be swapped for those.

Because not all the woke modes are the same, they will also include the correct racist mode, where every character is a gender identity of your choosing as long as it's woman, with an optional butt plug accessory that will provide a boost in speed, every single enemy is a white straight dude because ewwww being straight. You get a congratulatory "You go girl! Let's take down the patriarchy!" voice recorded message by Neil Druckmann while being sodomized every time you kill a white, straight enemy. :p

Honestly this post somehow managed to be more cringe inducing than anything I found in TLOU 2

I have no illusions that this will happen or that we’ll get a Grounded update at all. If we do, I am willing to bet it will just be the standard enemy health/damage bump, increased scarcity, etc.

Trauma: Bone breaks, bullet retrieval, bandaging, arrow removal. Falls from fairly high will fracture legs, slowing movement and decreasing max health temporarily until you can address the injury. Bullets will occasionally need to be fished out of the wounds they make. Player input will be required for bandaging beyond simply pressing R2.

Honestly I'm down for everything else BUT this. After Far Cry 2 just give me health packs/regen, this was so tedious.
 
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Blond

Banned
I have no illusions that this will happen or that we’ll get a Grounded update at all. If we do, I am willing to bet it will just be the standard enemy health/damage bump, increased scarcity, etc.
Trauma: Bone breaks, bullet retrieval, bandaging, arrow removal. Falls from fairly high will fracture legs, slowing movement and decreasing max health temporarily until you can address the injury. Bullets will occasionally need to be fished out of the wounds they make. Player input will be required for bandaging beyond simply pressing R2.​

Honestly I'm down for everything else BUT this. After Far Cry 2 just give me health packs/regen, this was so tedious.
 

Umbral

Member
Honestly I'm down for everything else BUT this. After Far Cry 2 just give me health packs/regen, this was so tedious.
That’s understandable. I liked that part of Far Cry 2, but I get it. I hated the immortal outposts in that game and the sound of the trucks charging you are in my nightmares.
 

Bartski

Gold Member
Trauma: Bone breaks, bullet retrieval, bandaging, arrow removal. Falls from fairly high will fracture legs, slowing movement and decreasing max health temporarily until you can address the injury. Bullets will occasionally need to be fished out of the wounds they make. Player input will be required for bandaging beyond simply pressing R2.​

I think that would be really awesome. Where you'd have to get back to stealth to mend your wounds, and enemies could follow your blood trails.
I'm really waiting for games to start doing this and I hope "hard" modes of the future will be all about system changes rather than hit point economy.

Also - get shot in chest/head and you're dead, no exceptions. That could actually be mitigated by enemies programmed to deliberately miss until the point you "run out of luck", which btw happens in games all the time as key part of enemy AI, plenty of GDC talks about it available... but if they hit you - it's over. More damage dealt, more damage received. I hope when the time comes to replay the game on PS5 - it comes with some kind of ultra-hardcore realistic mode I know I'll enjoy the most.
 

Bartski

Gold Member
here we go


I8SjHfb.jpg
 

MrS

Banned
Not gonna replay it til PS5 drops. Glad Grounded is here for our enjoyment though. Hopefully Factions will be here soon too.
 

Bartski

Gold Member
This mode triples enemy damage, removes Listen Mode (the tool that helps players track nearby enemies), removes the HUD, and offers next to no supplies strewn about the world.

 

Hostile_18

Banned
Omg I'm so happy but please tell me you can cheat perma death... like reload a save lol (a bit like not using the vita chambers in Bioshock).

I've only got the last two trophy for fully upgrading the weapons to go. Will this get me it or am I better off doing new game plus on easy now I wonder. Ideally I want to play this again on PS5 getting the last 2 trophies and these new 2 in one go.
 

Umbral

Member
So lame. Damage buffs, no HUD (which you could already do), no listen mode (which you could do with discipline. I never once used it.), fewer resources, fewer checkpoints. All run-of-the-mill difficulty changes. My dreams will remain dreams.

If Naughty Dog hasn’t spoken about this themselves, where did Polygon get the details?
 

Shmunter

Member
So lame. Damage buffs, no HUD (which you could already do), no listen mode (which you could do with discipline. I never once used it.), fewer resources, fewer checkpoints. All run-of-the-mill difficulty changes. My dreams will remain dreams.

If Naughty Dog hasn’t spoken about this themselves, where did Polygon get the details?
Looks alright, what’s missing.

No listen mode is up my alley, I hardly used it, but dipped when things got tough and I hate myself for it.
 

xrnzaaas

Gold Member
Omg I'm so happy but please tell me you can cheat perma death... like reload a save lol (a bit like not using the vita chambers in Bioshock).

I've only got the last two trophy for fully upgrading the weapons to go. Will this get me it or am I better off doing new game plus on easy now I wonder. Ideally I want to play this again on PS5 getting the last 2 trophies and these new 2 in one go.
A death is a death, but you can always make a backup of your saves on an usb drive, like once every level for example. I doubt it works for playthroughs that started before this patch, but it's just my guess.
 
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Dorohedoro

Member
Those filters look awesome. Some bonus skins like they had in TLoU1 would be nice to have in another update. And this time they'll appear in the cutscenes.
 

Umbral

Member
After reading the post from Naughty Dog, it seems there’s more to the update that’s in line with what I wanted than what Polygon reported.

  • Infinite Melee Durability
  • Disable Listen Mode
  • Gyro Aim (sadly for new players, can only be unlocked after finishing the game)

Everything else is gravy. Gyro Aim is the thing I’m most excited for, though I don’t see myself playing it again until a PS5 patch drops. Not a bad update, overall.

Edit: I really thought they wouldn’t put the graphics modes in because they take themselves too seriously. Much like removing Donut Drake from U4. I’m glad to see I was wrong.
 
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