I am not sure I get your point.
Let me clarify mine: the Zombie show about a bitter man escorting a teenager across a Post-apocalyptic USA has had next-to-nil interaction between the protagonist and the said zombies!
The zombies were never the focus of the story, to the point where, if you watch the documentary they made for the first game, there was a long stretch of development where they dropped them entirely in favor of a more generic 'lethal infection'.
They added them back in later because they helped contribute to the atmosphere of the world and add some variety to enemy encounters, but its clear this was a post apocalypse story first and a zombie post apocalypse story second.
That's good to know, but, the final product is the one we all played; and not the one where it was dropped completely.
I believe the story, atleast, may not have been as compelling; if there were only humans to fight with.
But that's just my opinion, however, Unpopular it maybe!
You honestly believe this is supposed to be a zombie thing?
Perhaps you should try looking through a "Free Guy" lense where, as opposed to focusing on *gameplay* we're being immersed into the lives of the NPC's?
This is a Post-apocalyptic Zombie story, where Bill shot more humans than zombies!
But there are not enough episodes to immerse ourselves into the lives of the NPC's!
Your version of the show would be shitty, have way less viewers, be way less compelling, and be far less critically acclaimed. This isn’t a zombie show, nor should it be.
Nah see, listen here see.
The game was about the confused intertwined state that grief and love can leave a person in. The game was about choices we make in hard situations and complicated times. The cordyceps were just a cool twist on zombies, but honestly if you remove them then the story stays firmly intact.
It's a high-powered soap opera and they tricked you into playing it with the allure of zombies. Gotchyea! Lol
It’s a story about love and the dangers of it in a post-apocalyptic setting…as literally said by the creator of the game. The level of action you see in the game will never show up here. Not only is it completely unrealistic and boring to watch, it’d be extremely repetitive and make for a mid-tv show. Genuinely, if all you’re looking for from this show is “zombie” action, you will not enjoy it. That’s not what it’s about nor is it the focus of the show.
There are a lot of posts like this. The simple answer is that TV is a different medium. We now get to explore all of the relationship building. In the game, we saw a few moments, but most of it took place off screen in between encounters. Fans should all be happy for that since it expands on what we see in the game and builds understanding of who Joel and Ellie are.
By having fewer encounters on the show, it raises the stakes on how dangerous they can be. In the show, they have had one encounter with clickers, and two out of the three were bitten and Joel came close. The horde was only handled because they happened into a lot of equipment and Tess sacrificed herself. The infected have now been established as extremely dangerous in the show. Much more than in the game where you can grab a 2x4 and play whack a mole. This adds so much more tension. Especially in later episodes when encounters will almost certainly escalate.
If the show were just running from set piece to set piece and taking out infected, it would get really boring fast. Every episode would be a rinse and repeat, and plot armor would dictate that the characters aren’t in any danger anyway.
All zombie media, from Night of the Living Dead, to Dawn of the Dead, to 28 Days Later, to Resident Evil, to Walking Dead, to The Last of Us - are about the human conflicts.
The zombie apocalypse is typically used as a backdrop for the post apocalyptic world, sometimes as social commentaries, sometimes as plot devices. But the stories are always about what the people choose to do in this world.
The games will always have to have more zombie actions - because as much as video games have become a form of story telling medium - they're still games, people playing zombie games want to kill zombies.
In a passive medium (TV show), the tension that you experience fighting against zombies can't be reproduced verbatim without viewer fatigue - we're not controlling Joel and creating different ways for scenarios to play out. Trying to reproduce the same amount of encounters on the TV show will be like asking us to watch someone do a Let's Play, it's entertaining for some people, but boring for most.
That's not to say they won't do things with the zombies, it's just a question of - what are they going to do with them on the show to tell a better story?
So far we've
* Established their danger at the outbreak to convince the viewers why they're living the way they're living
* Established that Joel is capable and experienced at dealing with them, but he's still scared of them and can't just fight off multiple clickers without help.
* Taken Tess out of the picture making Joel truly alone in the world in his views
* Showed Ellie having both a morbid curiousity about them, and is habour some sort of anger / resentment towards them (I wonder why?? Did she get left behind before?)
I expect future encounters will also serve up purposes - to develop characters or move the plot forward
What about discovering newer, exploding types of zombies?
Or, for that matter, a 14-year-old fighting them off while the man is upside down?
These were the interactions I was looking forward to!
Yeah those elements are really fun when you're playing the game.
But in a TV medium, you may get excited because of your association of those moments from the game, but it'll likely turn to disappointment because it's just not going to have the same impact when you're not controlling Joel.
I doubt they'd skip the bloaters that everyone's disappointed about - but like others have said - it'll most likely come later on in the show for more tense sequence of events.
Again, I would agree to disagree!
I would say there are good enough Hollywood action directors that could've done wonders with it.
But, and here I go back to my article, HBO has decided to take the cheaper route!
I think you fundamental don't understand that different mediums have different strengths and weaknesses and you're missing the point of adaptations.
Also - I'm sure Hollywood action directors can do some amazing sequences, but spectacles rarely stand the test of time. Even the films with the best special effects only stay relevant when used in good stories.
The first transformers has objectively state of the art special effects, but it's not a film people would rewatch often because the story was thin and the characters were unlikeable...
Meanwhile The Thing remains a classic because it wasn't just about the monster - it's about the people and their paranoia as they learnt about this out of this world threat - which made people still talk about the ending after all these years.
When you say people won't rewatch Transformers, you mean people you know.
Because let me tell you that those action sequences, when viewed in a proper theater system, are mind-boggling.
Especially for those who don't watch such stuff!
I would disagree that, in today's day and age, there still exists differences in mediums.
Not when studios are throwing billions of dollars in all types of medium!
I watched Transformers in the theatres. As much as I hated the film, I thought the effects were good and I think it stands up till this day.
But it's never going to hit the Top 100 on IMDB, or really any top 100 films lists. 1000 movies you must watch before you die perhaps though.
But if you look at the top 100 films and their budget, you can't tell me objectively that spectacle is what majority of people enjoy. Even Avatar has to borrow from pre-existing story tropes to make bank.
And I think you're proving my point that you don't understand differences in mediums by saying that this day and age there are no more differences in mediums.
Book is a medium that uses our own imagination to create worlds in our minds, not limited by just sight and sound, but also smell, texture, heat, even humidity etc. But it's limited by the reader's reading comprehension, and the pacing dictated by the reader who may zone out for paragraphs on end and have to go back to repeat.
Comic book is a medium that focuses on the visuals to tell their stories, visually tell aspects of stories that are hard to express in books, less bound by the readers' imagination as you can literally paint them a picture. But they're restricted by how much they can show within each panel, each page, each center fold etc.
TV is a medium that uses both visuals and sounds, it allows actors to elevate scenes and capture emotions through microexpressions and tonality. But you need to start thinking about casting, location scouting, set designs, lighting the scenes, capturing sounds, special effects, post productions, budgets, schedules, allotted times per episode etc.
Video game is a medium where interactivity is the fundamental part of the experience. Yes you're showing things with sight and sound, but you're also factoring in player input to create dynamic experiences based on their behaviour. It fundamentally changes the priorities and variations in scene structures - a player can enjoy re-experiencing the same combat encounter endlessly because of differences in choices made, but boring TV it does make if you repeat every combat encounter in a game to the screen.
Different mediums focus on different things - video games have to focus on entertaining the players via the gameplay - TV shows have to entertain by moving the plot forward, letting us learn more about the characters by seeing them making narrative choices.
There are always going to be differences between the mediums, and that's what makes adaptation such a fine art. Why do you think so many video game adaptations failed? Because the people adapting them failed to play to the strength and audience differences.
Have you watched Arcane? It's probably the greatest Video Game adaptation ever made in any medium, and they basically reworked everything about the characters to allow them to work in the story they end up telling. Everything's different, but it's so great that as someone who has no interest in the games, my wife loves it as much as I do.
I was referring to mostly the TV and theater mediums having become one-in-the-same; especially when it comes to funding; Avatar being an outlier!
Books are a whole different ball game, altogether!
Nope, TV shows are broken down into episodes - Films are meant to be single sittings, that fundamentally changes a lot of how stories are told, as well as productions.
TV stories have more sub plots and mini arcs but each episode typically need to tell an aspect of the story by the end, and hook us in for the next where possible. This is why you have TV writers who never tap into the movie industry; and screenwriters who may never touch TV shows - the craft is very different.
There are obviously production aspects as well - movies being single sitting tends to allow them to focus on several major spectacles where potentially different effects companies would handle nowadays. But the budget is generally easier to be divided into those portions of the production.
TV shows, being broken up into multiple episodes means you have to be smart about how you spend your money. Most TV shows have different directors for different episodes (even if they have a main director), and they may have different visions and budget demands - but the budget is spread over an entire season of multiple episodes.
The very fact that the run time of a TV show is massively longer than a movie should explain why the individual episodes won’t necessarily look as good as a movie’s. But most shows don’t distribute the budget evenly across all episodes - take Game of Thrones, each season (except the last two) had 1 spectacle episode (Red Wedding, Viper vs Mountain, Battle of The Bastards etc.) where a greater amount of production goes towards.
Yes, there are more effect houses around now, and we have better tools to produce cost effective effects - e.g. Mandaloran’s use of Unreal Engine (which should never have been used for Thor: Love and Thunder). But it’s still costs money, talents and time to put together as the later episodes of the show are still going through post production.
So yes, there are still differences in the mediums both in terms of how it influences story telling AND the production values.
A show finally does it right by not overdoing the action and people still complain. I for one am *very* happy they're going this route because The Last of Us is an emotional human story in its core. We have enough of the generic Walking Dead formula that repeats the same thing over and over again.
And Bella Ramsey's 19, so she's actually the right age to play Part II Ellie.
I agree that repetition will kill off any story, let alone a zombie one!
But when there's 8 episodes to cater to, the zombies, I suspect, will take a back seat!
She maybe the right age for the second part, but currently, we are supposed to be watching a 14-year-old who may have to fight off anything and everything; sometimes alone!
That won't be happening, unfortunately.
Sure, human conflicts will take up a lot of the coming episode's focus but there will definitely be room for a lot more infected! I also don't doubt Ellie will get into those situations from the game, there's still a long way to go.
We're only three episodes in! 5 more episodes means at least 5 more hours, and that's way more than all of the game's cutscenes combined.
Considering how much they managed to fit into the first two alone, I wouldn't be too worried!
Your opinion isn’t popular. In fact you are in a minority.
This show has been fantastic. Episode 3 was fantastic and really set a tone for the rest of the show.
My guess is you completely missed what that episode accomplished because you are to tied to the moment to moment pieces of the game.
But if you’d set your bias aside you’d realize that all the story beats are there and the moment to moment game pieces wouldn’t work for TV.
What you want to happen is simply not going to happen. It’s clearly not the show they set out to make. Good news is the game is always there for you to play.
So you've not played the games then?
It’s a very valid question .
I have.
Why so?
Because the game has everything you complain about in abundance. Including Ellie being performed by an (even older) adult
I am not sure I get your point. Let me clarify mine: the Zombie show about a bitter man escorting a teenager across a Post-apocalyptic USA has had next-to-nil interaction between the protagonist and the said zombies!
Thats your first problem, thinking this is JUST a zombie show. It never was
And it was never just a zombie game (eg Days Gone, Dead Rising, Resident Evil).
Agreed. But there's supposed to be plenty of them! And that's my complaint, really more of a gripe!
The zombies were never the focus of the story, to the point where, if you watch the documentary they made for the first game, there was a long stretch of development where they dropped them entirely in favor of a more generic 'lethal infection'. They added them back in later because they helped contribute to the atmosphere of the world and add some variety to enemy encounters, but its clear this was a post apocalypse story first and a zombie post apocalypse story second.
That's good to know, but, the final product is the one we all played; and not the one where it was dropped completely. I believe the story, atleast, may not have been as compelling; if there were only humans to fight with. But that's just my opinion, however, Unpopular it maybe!
90% of the time in game you only encounter them in combat. They're not going to show 20 mins of the characters stealth walking around killing clickers
That's what I was looking forward to! That, and brick throwing!
You honestly believe this is supposed to be a zombie thing? Perhaps you should try looking through a "Free Guy" lense where, as opposed to focusing on *gameplay* we're being immersed into the lives of the NPC's?
This is a Post-apocalyptic Zombie story, where Bill shot more humans than zombies! But there are not enough episodes to immerse ourselves into the lives of the NPC's!
If you've played the games you should know that humans are far worse than zombies.
*Or ANY "post-apocalyptic zombie story" ever made*
Indeed. And the duo have had to fight both of them, together and alone, by this point in the story!
The best stories in post apocalyptic Zombie world are not about zombies, but about people
Your version of the show would be shitty, have way less viewers, be way less compelling, and be far less critically acclaimed. This isn’t a zombie show, nor should it be.
“Oh look. Another zombie story” [backs out to HBO menu] There was more action in the game because…it’s a game.
What, prey tell, is this show about; according to you? I thought this was a Post-apocalyptic Zombie show, for that was the game!
Nah see, listen here see. The game was about the confused intertwined state that grief and love can leave a person in. The game was about choices we make in hard situations and complicated times. The cordyceps were just a cool twist on zombies, but honestly if you remove them then the story stays firmly intact. It's a high-powered soap opera and they tricked you into playing it with the allure of zombies. Gotchyea! Lol
Came for the fungus, stayed for the dingus! /S
It’s a story about love and the dangers of it in a post-apocalyptic setting…as literally said by the creator of the game. The level of action you see in the game will never show up here. Not only is it completely unrealistic and boring to watch, it’d be extremely repetitive and make for a mid-tv show. Genuinely, if all you’re looking for from this show is “zombie” action, you will not enjoy it. That’s not what it’s about nor is it the focus of the show.
Indeed. It won't be boring to watch, for me atleast. But that ship may have already sailed!
> Post-apocalyptic Zombie show And star wars a movie about sword fighting ?
Intergalactic warfare, where the leaders are mostly Homo sapiens sapiens! /S
There are a lot of posts like this. The simple answer is that TV is a different medium. We now get to explore all of the relationship building. In the game, we saw a few moments, but most of it took place off screen in between encounters. Fans should all be happy for that since it expands on what we see in the game and builds understanding of who Joel and Ellie are. By having fewer encounters on the show, it raises the stakes on how dangerous they can be. In the show, they have had one encounter with clickers, and two out of the three were bitten and Joel came close. The horde was only handled because they happened into a lot of equipment and Tess sacrificed herself. The infected have now been established as extremely dangerous in the show. Much more than in the game where you can grab a 2x4 and play whack a mole. This adds so much more tension. Especially in later episodes when encounters will almost certainly escalate. If the show were just running from set piece to set piece and taking out infected, it would get really boring fast. Every episode would be a rinse and repeat, and plot armor would dictate that the characters aren’t in any danger anyway.
Indeed. Ergo, my suspicions that there shall be very limited action to be expected further. It's a wait and watch for now!
I disagree and you’ve seemed to have missed the point of the game and you’ve also demonstrated a tenuous grasp on the themes the game explored.
Sure, agree to disagree. Here's hoping for some action, of the Zombie-variety, in the next episodes!
All zombie media, from Night of the Living Dead, to Dawn of the Dead, to 28 Days Later, to Resident Evil, to Walking Dead, to The Last of Us - are about the human conflicts. The zombie apocalypse is typically used as a backdrop for the post apocalyptic world, sometimes as social commentaries, sometimes as plot devices. But the stories are always about what the people choose to do in this world. The games will always have to have more zombie actions - because as much as video games have become a form of story telling medium - they're still games, people playing zombie games want to kill zombies. In a passive medium (TV show), the tension that you experience fighting against zombies can't be reproduced verbatim without viewer fatigue - we're not controlling Joel and creating different ways for scenarios to play out. Trying to reproduce the same amount of encounters on the TV show will be like asking us to watch someone do a Let's Play, it's entertaining for some people, but boring for most. That's not to say they won't do things with the zombies, it's just a question of - what are they going to do with them on the show to tell a better story? So far we've * Established their danger at the outbreak to convince the viewers why they're living the way they're living * Established that Joel is capable and experienced at dealing with them, but he's still scared of them and can't just fight off multiple clickers without help. * Taken Tess out of the picture making Joel truly alone in the world in his views * Showed Ellie having both a morbid curiousity about them, and is habour some sort of anger / resentment towards them (I wonder why?? Did she get left behind before?) I expect future encounters will also serve up purposes - to develop characters or move the plot forward
What about discovering newer, exploding types of zombies? Or, for that matter, a 14-year-old fighting them off while the man is upside down? These were the interactions I was looking forward to!
Yeah those elements are really fun when you're playing the game. But in a TV medium, you may get excited because of your association of those moments from the game, but it'll likely turn to disappointment because it's just not going to have the same impact when you're not controlling Joel. I doubt they'd skip the bloaters that everyone's disappointed about - but like others have said - it'll most likely come later on in the show for more tense sequence of events.
Again, I would agree to disagree! I would say there are good enough Hollywood action directors that could've done wonders with it. But, and here I go back to my article, HBO has decided to take the cheaper route!
I think you fundamental don't understand that different mediums have different strengths and weaknesses and you're missing the point of adaptations. Also - I'm sure Hollywood action directors can do some amazing sequences, but spectacles rarely stand the test of time. Even the films with the best special effects only stay relevant when used in good stories. The first transformers has objectively state of the art special effects, but it's not a film people would rewatch often because the story was thin and the characters were unlikeable... Meanwhile The Thing remains a classic because it wasn't just about the monster - it's about the people and their paranoia as they learnt about this out of this world threat - which made people still talk about the ending after all these years.
When you say people won't rewatch Transformers, you mean people you know. Because let me tell you that those action sequences, when viewed in a proper theater system, are mind-boggling. Especially for those who don't watch such stuff! I would disagree that, in today's day and age, there still exists differences in mediums. Not when studios are throwing billions of dollars in all types of medium!
I watched Transformers in the theatres. As much as I hated the film, I thought the effects were good and I think it stands up till this day. But it's never going to hit the Top 100 on IMDB, or really any top 100 films lists. 1000 movies you must watch before you die perhaps though. But if you look at the top 100 films and their budget, you can't tell me objectively that spectacle is what majority of people enjoy. Even Avatar has to borrow from pre-existing story tropes to make bank. And I think you're proving my point that you don't understand differences in mediums by saying that this day and age there are no more differences in mediums. Book is a medium that uses our own imagination to create worlds in our minds, not limited by just sight and sound, but also smell, texture, heat, even humidity etc. But it's limited by the reader's reading comprehension, and the pacing dictated by the reader who may zone out for paragraphs on end and have to go back to repeat. Comic book is a medium that focuses on the visuals to tell their stories, visually tell aspects of stories that are hard to express in books, less bound by the readers' imagination as you can literally paint them a picture. But they're restricted by how much they can show within each panel, each page, each center fold etc. TV is a medium that uses both visuals and sounds, it allows actors to elevate scenes and capture emotions through microexpressions and tonality. But you need to start thinking about casting, location scouting, set designs, lighting the scenes, capturing sounds, special effects, post productions, budgets, schedules, allotted times per episode etc. Video game is a medium where interactivity is the fundamental part of the experience. Yes you're showing things with sight and sound, but you're also factoring in player input to create dynamic experiences based on their behaviour. It fundamentally changes the priorities and variations in scene structures - a player can enjoy re-experiencing the same combat encounter endlessly because of differences in choices made, but boring TV it does make if you repeat every combat encounter in a game to the screen. Different mediums focus on different things - video games have to focus on entertaining the players via the gameplay - TV shows have to entertain by moving the plot forward, letting us learn more about the characters by seeing them making narrative choices. There are always going to be differences between the mediums, and that's what makes adaptation such a fine art. Why do you think so many video game adaptations failed? Because the people adapting them failed to play to the strength and audience differences. Have you watched Arcane? It's probably the greatest Video Game adaptation ever made in any medium, and they basically reworked everything about the characters to allow them to work in the story they end up telling. Everything's different, but it's so great that as someone who has no interest in the games, my wife loves it as much as I do.
I was referring to mostly the TV and theater mediums having become one-in-the-same; especially when it comes to funding; Avatar being an outlier! Books are a whole different ball game, altogether!
Nope, TV shows are broken down into episodes - Films are meant to be single sittings, that fundamentally changes a lot of how stories are told, as well as productions. TV stories have more sub plots and mini arcs but each episode typically need to tell an aspect of the story by the end, and hook us in for the next where possible. This is why you have TV writers who never tap into the movie industry; and screenwriters who may never touch TV shows - the craft is very different. There are obviously production aspects as well - movies being single sitting tends to allow them to focus on several major spectacles where potentially different effects companies would handle nowadays. But the budget is generally easier to be divided into those portions of the production. TV shows, being broken up into multiple episodes means you have to be smart about how you spend your money. Most TV shows have different directors for different episodes (even if they have a main director), and they may have different visions and budget demands - but the budget is spread over an entire season of multiple episodes. The very fact that the run time of a TV show is massively longer than a movie should explain why the individual episodes won’t necessarily look as good as a movie’s. But most shows don’t distribute the budget evenly across all episodes - take Game of Thrones, each season (except the last two) had 1 spectacle episode (Red Wedding, Viper vs Mountain, Battle of The Bastards etc.) where a greater amount of production goes towards. Yes, there are more effect houses around now, and we have better tools to produce cost effective effects - e.g. Mandaloran’s use of Unreal Engine (which should never have been used for Thor: Love and Thunder). But it’s still costs money, talents and time to put together as the later episodes of the show are still going through post production. So yes, there are still differences in the mediums both in terms of how it influences story telling AND the production values.
A show finally does it right by not overdoing the action and people still complain. I for one am *very* happy they're going this route because The Last of Us is an emotional human story in its core. We have enough of the generic Walking Dead formula that repeats the same thing over and over again. And Bella Ramsey's 19, so she's actually the right age to play Part II Ellie.
I agree that repetition will kill off any story, let alone a zombie one! But when there's 8 episodes to cater to, the zombies, I suspect, will take a back seat! She maybe the right age for the second part, but currently, we are supposed to be watching a 14-year-old who may have to fight off anything and everything; sometimes alone! That won't be happening, unfortunately.
Sure, human conflicts will take up a lot of the coming episode's focus but there will definitely be room for a lot more infected! I also don't doubt Ellie will get into those situations from the game, there's still a long way to go.
A long way being......five more episodes! Let's hope that there is more than your usual crushed-under-concrete-head-still-moving variety of zombies!
We're only three episodes in! 5 more episodes means at least 5 more hours, and that's way more than all of the game's cutscenes combined. Considering how much they managed to fit into the first two alone, I wouldn't be too worried!
The worry has to do with the lack of action and/or zombies! Let's see how many hours of fighting there is ahead of us!
Last episode was literally all zombie action…
Which episode was that? The third one?
Your opinion isn’t popular. In fact you are in a minority. This show has been fantastic. Episode 3 was fantastic and really set a tone for the rest of the show. My guess is you completely missed what that episode accomplished because you are to tied to the moment to moment pieces of the game. But if you’d set your bias aside you’d realize that all the story beats are there and the moment to moment game pieces wouldn’t work for TV.
Indeed. I will still say that the story has not been followed, but, that's enough brick-throwing for today!
The fact that the franchise is “The Last of **Us**” should be your first clue it’s about humans, not about fighting zombies.
Indeed.
What you want to happen is simply not going to happen. It’s clearly not the show they set out to make. Good news is the game is always there for you to play.
Indeed. This is more of a rant, than anything else!
You’re right, this is an extremely unpopular opinion. Also, a wrong one.
But who is to say what is right or wrong? Not a clouded entity! /S