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Vikar Jerome posted:Uh, they are pretty good actually, whats pointless about them, apart from the tree you start the game with. Works in tandem with ellie learning advanced poo poo the same way joel had to pre-1, presumably. I haven't been excited to unlock any of the skills. I can't remember if that was the case in the first game, but most of it is just bigger numbers
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Jun 21, 2020 21:06
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Darko posted:The skills aren't making much of a difference in general gameplay at all either. At least when it comes to stealth. The stealth ones seemed so nebulous that I just went all in on explosives, and now I escalate every fight to big bada boom.
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Jun 21, 2020 21:33
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smoobles posted:I loved the game overall but (total game spoilers) the writing definitely suffers from the audience learning the moral way before Ellie does. She spends the epilogue doing everything I, the player, do NOT want to do because the writers beat me over the head with graphic depictions of why cycles of violence are bad for everyone. It's a weird motivational disconnect where I felt I was only playing to see how the story ends instead of identifying with Ellie and feeling the same drive. In contrast, the climax of TLOU 1 even if Joel was doing something awful and killing the good guys, I partially sympathized with wanting to save Ellie whom I'd gotten to know and love over the course of the game, and the fact that the scientists gave her no choice. In this game I kept thinking "I don't want to do any of this" for the final stretch as Ellie. I get the story and the character, but maybe video games aren't the right medium to have horribly flawed people with bad outlooks on life as the protagonist. Very much my feelings too after just completing it. Seattle Day 3 Abby Edition spoilers: When Abby eventually made it to the theater, and the game handed control over to me in order to fight Ellie, I couldn't do it. I put the controller down, let Ellie kill her, put the PS4 in rest mode and walked away. It took a full day to go back to it, and I stuck the game on the easiest difficulty because I thought I couldn't put up with having to retry multiple times to complete a fight that I didn't want to happen. Over the course of that day I thought about exactly why this particular fight was the point that I wanted to stop. Yes it felt pointless and cruel, but then doesn't that describe 95% of the human on human fights in this game Don't read unless you've completed the game: I was able to play and appreciate the epilogue from farm onwards by essentially recasting my role as the player. I'm not playing these characters, exactly. I'm playing their worst impulses, and it's my job to ruin their lives. Like a GM in a tabletop RPG, it's up to me to push these characters as hard as I can while simultaneously hoping that I lose. I think the game wants that from you; the whole farm sequence, from the moment Tommy pulls out the map to Ellie standing in the kitchen with her bag as Dina discovers she's leaving is absolutely unequivocally framing everything Ellie is about to do as a terrible decision. She should tell Tommy to gently caress off and enjoy the rest of her life. But then we've also just played the sheep herding sequence and seen the depths of Ellie's trauma, and it makes us wonder whether Ellie is even capable of saying no to Tommy. She's a shattered wreck of a person, and Tommy is a grade A manipulator. He's alive because he's good at killing and at getting people to do what he wants. Once that seed was planted, it felt like the die was cast. I also very much appreciated the placement of the last scene with Ellie and Joel. From the moment you discover that Ellie knows the truth about Joel and the Fireflies, the question is raised: why is Ellie so driven to avenge a man who she now knows killed all hope for a mushroom-free world. As the player I happily went along with it up to a point. Killing dudes is fun in this game and an angry vengeful protagonist is a powerful driving force. Then you find out that Ellie had a spark of hope that things could be mended between her and Joel. It's not much of a reason, but as the player I was content to murder everyone up to and including Owen without even that flimsy justification. Game good, Abby better than Raiden, go for a pee during cutscenes involving Owen and Abby
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Jun 22, 2020 03:02
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Timeless Appeal posted:It's fine to not like a game, but i think it's disingenuous to believe Last of Us is breaking some video game rules. And even if it is breaking rules, it understands why those rules exist and what it means to break them. As other posters have said, these games have found fertile ground in messing with the rule that says protagonist and player intent should broadly align. It's not new ground, but it's one thing for a 3 hour indie game to do it, it's another thing entirely to attempt in two flagship console swan song titles. Bending the implicit rules of a medium to breaking point feels like an essential part of the growth of that medium, so even if I didn't love them (and I do) they'd still be important for that reason alone.
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Jun 22, 2020 11:46
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:This post is so nice as many of us had that spoiled for us, while overall the spoilers didn't stop me from loving this game yeah I envy that moment you must have realised. It was an incredible experience to play unspoiled. I saw the very first trailer with the guitar and the dance, I saw the first gameplay trailer with the sequence in the park, and nothing else. No screenshots, no articles, and no other videos. It was worth the effort.
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Jun 22, 2020 11:53
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JBP posted:I watched the spoilers and read the spoiler thread. Nothing was ruined and half that poo poo wasn't right or was so out of context that it was nothing. Oh cool, I'm glad that this is the case since I know a few people who saw the spoilers unintentionally when they got spammed in a bunch of comment sections. I tend to avoid most trailers for stuff because I can get easily worn out by the hype and build up for a new game, and that definitely has a negative impact on my enjoyment
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Jun 22, 2020 12:01
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Depressing music lets you know that no matter how bad you feel, someone else has felt the same. (many) Depressing video games make you feel like whatever you do, the world is hosed.
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Jun 22, 2020 12:19
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JBP posted:I just shoot the guns and deliver the action scenes, it's up to the characters to make their various lifestyle choices and deliver dialogue. That's the attitude that got me through the last third of this game
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Jun 22, 2020 12:28
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I love that you know you're down to the last Scar in an encounter because they whistle and no one whistles back
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Jun 22, 2020 12:48
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When comparing Ellie and Abby's handling of revenge and ability to break out of the cycle of violence, I think it's somewhat important to look at where they learned their moral framework. Joel was a murderer who saw a chance to replace the daughter he lost, and continued to murder in order to keep things that way. He taught her to be a hammer, and that people who get in your way are nails. Abby's father was a (brain?) surgeon who taught her about the sanctity of life and agonised massively over the idea of killing one person to have a chance at saving the human species. At the end of the first game where you are given no choice about how to deal with the scene in the operating theatre as Joel, I took that as the game telling me that Joel is incapable of seeing any other option. I think this game mirrors that with Ellie's "bad choices", and goes further by showing you first hand what the years of accumulated trauma have done to her. I think getting into comparisons of who is the better person between Ellie and Abby is to vastly downplay the fact that trauma can rob you of the ability to make good choices and that circumstance is a huge factor in how these things play out. When Abby spares Ellie in the theatre, it's because the person who saved her life stops her at the last second. When Ellie leaves Dina to go after Abby, she's just had her overwhelming guilt manipulated by her surrogate uncle, a man who has saved her life several times over. And even then, after all this, she stops short of killing Abby without anyone having to tell her to.
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Jun 22, 2020 19:18
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am0kgonzo posted:i don't think we watched the same cutscene Doctors are trained to make triage decisions that can seem cold to people who don't deal with life and death on a daily basis. The fact that he expressed any misgivings at all at a point where he'd already clearly decided on a course of action made me feel like it was a decision he had struggled with. I think he was naive about the Fireflies' ability to turn a candidate vaccine into something that could actually be distributed, but I don't think he made the decision to go through with the procedure lightly.
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Jun 22, 2020 19:29
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smoobles posted:lol Abby's dad cared more about a zebra's life than Ellie's. He made that decision immediately without even waking up Ellie to talk to her I don't think we see him make the decision on screen, do we? He came to Marlene for sign-off on going ahead with the procedure, at that point he's already decided what to do punk rebel ecks posted:Wait they already did the operation on other people who were immune but failed? Yeah, that's news to me and obviously would change the thoughts that I posted above
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Jun 22, 2020 19:32
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Cardiovorax posted:Man, that kind of defangs the entire supposed moral conundrum making up Joel's choice not to sacrifice Ellie at the end of TLOU 1. If there are more immune people and they basically keep happening on the regular, humanity will just self-select for immunity within a fairly short time anyway and the entire thing would've been pointless one way or the other. there aren't more immune people, the people they'd previously operated / experimented on were infected
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Jun 22, 2020 19:43
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Danger posted:One thing that really worked for me (day 3 second time spoilers): This was a great bit of timing, especially since it means you've seen (end of day 3 second time)Abby's reaction to Mel's death very recently when Ellie begs Abby to spare Dina because she's pregnant
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Jun 22, 2020 19:52
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am0kgonzo posted:i only go by what the game shows me I agree that came across as cowardly, but I don't think he was as gung-ho about it as people are suggesting. If he wanted the sample at all costs he could have just gone ahead with the procedure and then sadly Ellie died due to "complications"
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Jun 22, 2020 19:56
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FallenGod posted:They had her drugged and thrown on the operating table for vivisection mere hours after finding an unidentified drowned girl near the hospital. Ok, I need to replay the end of the first game because I'm clearly forgetting a bunch of important stuff
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Jun 22, 2020 20:08
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mcbexx posted:Because I have seen multiple players pass on this opporunity, in fact I have not seen a single one do it - if you don't cut the [Santa Barbara Spoiler]two chained up Clickers loose, you're playing this game wrong. As soon as I realised this was an option, I restarted the encounter and did it straight away. Highly recommended
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Jun 23, 2020 17:22
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:They do. It also lists collectibles per chapter so you can see what you missed. The one BIG TIP I’ve read is to make sure to make a Manual Save in the final chapter since it appears chapter select is tied to saved progress so if you jump to an earlier chapter (without that final manual save) then you won’t be able to select past the chapter you chose. When I finished, the game automatically made backup copies of my final save both before and after the final cutscene and credits. I didn't know it had done this, and I went back to replay a particular sequence. When I went back to the main menu the NG+ option was gone and I was pissed off until I went to the Load menu. All you have to do is load the post credits save and you get full chapter select (and NG+) back Tarnop fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Jun 24, 2020 |
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Jun 24, 2020 04:00
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BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:I don't think many people have actually argued the moment to moment character dialogue is bad (because it isn't) It's good for the most part, but I know I'm going to struggle to play through the two Abby and Owen sequences in the aquarium again. Those scenes really dragged and some well-written dialogue would have made all the difference, and might have made me give a poo poo about Owen as a character
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Jun 24, 2020 04:14
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Steve Yun posted:Story theme notes: Owen as written couldn't talk an alcoholic into a night at a bar. He's a charisma vacuum
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Jun 24, 2020 04:27
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Steve Yun posted:Yeah it was years of online essays that opened up the depths of TLOU1 to me Can you (or anyone) link me some good ones about the first game? This thread has made me think my read on it is a little shallow
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Jun 25, 2020 03:52
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:Video essays okay? They sound great, thanks!
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Jun 25, 2020 04:51
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RareAcumen posted:Pro-tip, there's an accessibility option that gives you a progression arrow if click the left stick. It's very helpful if you're the type to get lost in games a lot like me. I'm mostly sure that it's under Navigation. It's also super useful if you don't get lost but want to clear an area before going through a point of no return
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Jun 25, 2020 15:30
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Steve Yun posted:
Full game spoilers, final scene included: A lot of people have talked about this, and I guess it's supposed to be what the game is saying, but I'm not sure the text of the game fully supports it. Abby: Is a soldier for the WLF and routinely kills people in fulfillment of this role. Tortures a man to death for killing her father. Goes back to killing people for the WLF. Has her life saved by Lev and Yara, members of the faction that she was killing. Tries to repay that debt by protecting Y&L, and in doing so kills a whole bunch more Scars, WLF, and basically anyone in her way. Discovers that her friends have been killed in retribution for Joel. Immediately goes to hunt down and kill the person responsible. Kills Jesse, cripples Tommy, and is only prevented from killing Ellie by Lev's last second intervention. Ellie: lives what seems like a decent life in Jackson, and contributes by patrolling for and killing zombies. Sees Joel tortured to death, heads out for revenge. Hunts down and kills the people in the lynch mob that came for Joel (also killing anyone in her way). Breaks down when she realises one of them was pregnant. Is spared, ostensibly by Abby (but Lev, really). Goes off to live a chill farm life but is mentally hosed due to overwhelming PTSD and guilt over what happened to Joel. Is manipulated into another stupid revenge mission by her surrogate uncle. Ultimately finds the strength within herself to spare Abby and Lev, functionally saving them from death by crucifixion. I dunno, I just think that Ellie managing to overcome her need for revenge at the end of the game shows more strength and growth than Abby sparing Ellie when urged to do so by the person who saved her life. As far as pointless missions for revenge go, they're both 2 for 2, and Ellie is clearly has a lot more mitigating poo poo going on when she heads out that second time, to the point where I find it hard to blame her. I'm open to changing my mind, because I'm still processing all of this days after finishing the game, but this is where I am right now Tarnop fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jun 25, 2020 |
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Jun 25, 2020 22:03
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acksplode posted:Ellie didn't seem like she wanted to leave Seattle without finding Abby, she was just resigned to it because she didn't want to get anyone she cared about killed. I believe what she did to Mel made her think of what could happen to Dina. That certainly seems like a valid read on the situation, and you can see the narrative intent behind it. Abby saved Lev, ostensibly her enemy, which meant Lev was there to pull her back from the edge. The dissonance there is that if Abby is supposed to have learned that "the other" is actually just composed of people like her with inner lives and hopes and dreams then it certainly doesn't stop her from murdering a whole fuckload of them from a sniper position (at least in my game). And yeah I know, they're enemy combatants or whatever but the rules of engagement are out the window when you're handing guns to every man woman and child who can hold one and they're defending their homes. Now, if going lethal with Abby after meeting Lev and Yara started to have debilitating effects like her vertigo, that would be a statement. Players would hate it though, I imagine
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Jun 25, 2020 23:41
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Steve Yun posted:Holy poo poo the postgame is looooooooooong I'm not ashamed to say I turned the difficulty right down for that last section because I was so done with killing my way through yet another building full of grunts. The chained infected didn't make enough of a difference in gameplay for me to care
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Jun 26, 2020 00:29
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acksplode posted:
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Jun 26, 2020 00:43
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gonna have to fire up encounter mode and give that a quick try
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I finished the first game feeling like Joel was a real gaslighting, manipulative piece of poo poo and this game + some realtalk in this thread about how dumb and bad the fireflies were has pretty much changed my opinion completely
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Jun 26, 2020 01:22
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Rolo posted:That poo poo ruled.
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Jun 26, 2020 02:17
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:That dude was an rear end in a top hat I streamed the game for my friends who would normally have been sat on the sofa next to me. They got to see me pump 5 shotgun rounds into the ceiling before I landed the one that killed that son of a bitch. I was so ashamed watching the footage back
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Jun 26, 2020 02:32
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Vikar Jerome posted:Lol saw these resident evil bit posts and i thought hmm maybe i passed it? And then no, i am obviously in the resident evil bit and it owns. we're talking about the hospital basement, right? Yeah someone from Capcom had better be playing the heck out of that whole section
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Jun 26, 2020 02:58
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Dan Didio posted:According to the writers it's the Catalina island the fireflies talked about and they were legit, hence why they make Abby prove who she is first. But that's the building that's in the middle of the Rattler base, the one you go through to get to the beach. You're right that it's where the directions lead so surely that means it wasn't actually the Fireflies on the radio?
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Jun 26, 2020 04:23
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chinigz posted:exactly, that's my confusion, maybe it was all a ruse on the radio - but the boat is landed there after it's taken from the first beach ??? If that's not the building in the Rattler base then it's a really weird decision to use two very similar looking buildings
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Jun 26, 2020 04:31
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The flattened conical roof with the raised centre is such a distinctive design, and I remember looking for that on the skyline as I was heading into the base from the train tracks. At least he said it's a common question, makes me feel less bad at consuming media
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Jun 26, 2020 04:35
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chinigz posted:exceeded only by ellie's gnarly stab wound from the rattler trap - after that happened and the rattler said she'd die of infection, I was sure she was going to die because it paralleled Joel's injury from TLOU but because of her questionable life choices she had no-one to help her They were never going to kill Ellie and Joel in the same game. She never felt legitimately at risk of anything other than more psychological trauma and more injury. There are pen and paper RPGs designed to make your character hard to kill but relatively easy to turn into a disaster-generating mess. The Ellie sections felt like playing one of those.
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Jun 26, 2020 06:20
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Steve Yun posted:Finale notes: True, but it would have been inconsistent with the way they portrayed the scene in the barn after bringing in the sheep. Also I hope that PTSD is something most people have not experienced first hand, and I think it does a decent job of depicting intrusive thoughts and flashbacks so that the player really understands what a battle it is to do anything other than let all that anger take over.
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Jun 26, 2020 15:28
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Dan Didio posted:Well deserved. The people who will see the majority of the money from this are not the people who sacrificed their health to make it. All this does is justify lovely work culture in the industry. Yes I bought the game and I am a hypocrite.
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Jun 26, 2020 15:33
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Dan Didio posted:Okay. Is it?
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Jun 26, 2020 15:38
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Yeah, Joel strikes me as a bootstraps kind of guy
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Jun 26, 2020 16:02
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morallyobjected posted:I don't see a remaster, but they might be working on a PS5 version If you look at the unlockable model viewer, they have character models in there that, when I zoom in on them, make my PS4 blow like a jet engine and drop to 10-15 FPS. I'd imagine that their export pipeline is outputting assets at a level of complexity required to keep up 30 FPS on PS4 but, at least for characters, they have remaster quality models and textures ready to go.
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Jun 26, 2020 16:06
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