Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
Just finished it last night myself. Winter was awesome, and I actually quite liked the ending.

Quote Originally Posted by NeoCracker View Post
(SPOILER)I thought the end was great... Kind of.

What got me was the Fireflys had been doing this for a while, and made no progress, yet kept at it. (Mind you, it could have been a lie from Joel, but at the same time it makes more sense that he was telling the truth. I mean they discovered the mutation and plan pretty god damn fast, and decided to operate that soon? They had to have done this before.)

What kind of kills the ending a bit though was that no one took any kind of believable action. Hey, there's a guy trying to resusitate a girl! Let's knock him out.

Hey, there is girl I've practically raised as a sister/daughter! Let's sacrifice her to research that has consistantly failed horribley!

Hey, there's the guy who just gunned down god knows how many of our men! How about I not take this clean shot at his face!
I actually somewhat disagree with you here, but here's my reasons why if you're interested:

(SPOILER)- I really don't get the sense that the fireflies had done this before. I believe one of them makes not in one of the tape recorder messages in the hospital that they never saw anything like that mutation before. Now maybe they'd seem different levels of resistance before, but I doubt that even if this mutation was fairly common that people with it would survive long between infected attacking in groups, humans killing people who are bitten on sight, and just the general nastiness that can happen if a bite gets infected. Might be wrong, but that was the sense I got. We don't really know how long they had Ellie there doing tests either, but it's possible they'd been preparing for months before they all got there for what tests they'd need to run, ran them fast enough to determine they couldn't get the parasites out without killing her, then jumped to surgery. It is kind of fast though and probably just an excuse to have Joel need to kill their way out of there and save her.

- Knocking him out I get. You don't know who he is or what they want, knock him out, resuscitate the girl yourself and figure out what's up later. It'd be more prudent to kill them on sight to be honest, but they probably settled for knocking him out just in case since he didn't attack them right away and the girl needed help.

- You can actually find her journal in the hospital and she mentions showing up at the hospital without Ellie and thinking that she's probably dead. She ends up feeling ostracized because she lost the only hope they had for a vaccine and talks about not being able to take it there after a few weeks and possibly leaving because she can't stand how the other fireflies look at her any more. I'd imagine that that played a big role in her decision once Ellie turns up, not to mention her being the best hope of finding a cure. I'm not saying she made the right decision or even a good one, but where she's coming from is a bit more understandable in light of that. She's torn between her promise to Ellie's mother, her hope for a cure, and her original feelings of failure. Once Ellie shows up again it's like she was given a second chance to do what she originally set out to do. I think it's somewhat interesting to wonder if her decision would have been different had Ellie and Joel made it there at the same time or before her.

- Are we talking about after he picks up Ellie and runs for it? I thought it was weird at first but they may have needed her alive, or at least couldn't risk shooting her in the head or anything if they were going to be successful and get uncontaminated samples. They do open fire though when he's trying to get in the elevator and could potentially escape. In fact, I accidentally took a wrong turn the first time I attempted that sequence and one guard grabbed me while another grabbed Ellie and took her away before a third put a gun to Joel's head, so they really might have wanted her alive until the surgery.

Anyway, I'm not saying your interpretation of a lot of this stuff is wrong or anything, this is just what I took from it based on some information in the hospital and the behaviour of the NPC's.
(SPOILER)As for the level of resistance having not been seen before, the doctor recording that had never seen Ellie prior to this. Remember, she had never left that city until you took her out. They had all but one day to look at Ellie. It's not like Joel was out of it for a long period of time either, he was just knocked out. No way this had been more then a day. If Ellie was the first, all of their scans, planning, and decision came in less then a day. ANd this had to have been before they started prepping for surgery. If they didn't have experience in doing this stuff before, that makes them pretty smurfing stupid.

And knocking him out was still smurfing stupid. They could clearly see what he was doing. There wasn't really room there too mistake what he was doing. They had to realize he wasn't a threat, at all. It was clear he wasn't a soldier because he had a little girl with him, and the game seem pretty clear that bandits don't often have kids either. There was not a single reason to think he was a threat or in need of knocking out. Really this just makes the fireflies look like dicks.

The reasoning on that Journal makes enough sense, the problem is the actions of the Firefly's suggest that they already knew enough about Elly to have come up with a course of action this quickly. It's not like they were in immediate danger, and it's not like Ellie is going to turn any time soon. They were being WAY to reckless here for people who have been working on this trout for years, even if we do assume Ellie was the only one. It comes across that the only reason Joel was knocked out to begin with was a bit of plot convenience to set up his saving Ellie.

And I reffer to him getting off the Elevator and that one woman, I forget her name, was standing there. She was really close to the guy, and had ample time to put a bullet in his head. At that close a range, she is a good enough shot to have done this with no risk. She has to know you killed a lot of guys to make it this far, so again it just feels too convenient that she didn't shoot on site.


Again, they had to have examined her, discovered the bizarre mutation, discussed a course of action, and decided to preform a surgery that would kill her to remove and reverse engineer it all in the course of under 24 hours. This is beyond reckless unless they have seen and tried this before, in which case it's consistently failed and they are going ahead anyway. Basically the actions they took and the snip its you hear int he audio log are entirely inconstant with each other, and really makes for the games weakest moment of writing because of it.