Dishonored Series Is What The Last of Us Part 2 Should Have Been

[jamesbondsmith]

First off, I'm not one of the rabid TLOU2 haters. I think that Abby's storyline was actually a pretty gutsy move on the behalf of the developers, and in many other games she would have been the unambiguous protagonist. It was a good look at moral perspective. It was pretty well established that Joel had a dark past, and it isn't hard to believe someone might be coming after him for revenge.

That being said, I think the game had an enormous flaw in that it tries to guilt trip you for moral choices you have no control over. Many of the named characters Ellie kills are killed in cutscenes and often out of self defense. Even the ordinary gameplay is very much kill-or-be-killed. The game was saying 'tsk tsk tsk, violence and killing are wrong, now don't you feel terrible'. Meanwhile, I was just sitting there thinking 'sure, I'll remember that the next time I actually get a choice'. Granted, I may just not be skilled enough to avoid violence, and when I feel like putting myself through the bleak story again I might do a New Game+ and see if I can stealth or run past enemies.

The Dishonored series is a much better example of how this could have worked. TLOU2 and Dishonored both deal with taking revenge against a group of conspirators, and you hunt them down one by one. Dishonored lets you take down these targets lethally or non-lethally, and the same applies to the random npcs you see. In Dishonored, the more people you kill the darker the game gets, with characters cursing you as a murderer and trying that much harder to catch you. We could have had the WLF getting more and more ferocious as they are being killed, or had Infected be drawn to the dead (we see Runners eating corpses in the first game). It also would have been a sucker punch to get to know the people on Abby's side after having made a conscious choice to kill them. It already was to an extent, but it would have hit much harder if we hadn't been railroaded into it. I feel the choice of whether or not to kill would have gotten the message of non-violence a lot better than the heavily linear story TLOU2 gave us.

I haven't played a huge amount of other Naughty Dog games, but if Uncharted and TLOU can be taken as their general style then it seem like they are definitely a 'this is our story, player agency be damned' type of game studio.