Grounded 2 Raises The Question Of If The Last Of Us 2 Was Worth It

This past weekend released its long-awaited documentary on ’s development, and it’s a doozy. Grounded 2, a꧙ sequel to the 2014 documentary on the first game, dives into footage that was recorded during the second game’s production, but abandoned when the pandemic struck. Edited and released years after the game was originally launched with additional interviews recorded in 2023, Grounded 2 emphasises over and over again that The Last of Us Part 2 was a generation-defining game with♐ a real human cost.

The Game Of A Generation

The Last of Us Part 2 was one of the best games of 2020, and potentially one of the best triple-A games ever made. It pioneered advancements not just technically, with its astonishingly smooth and comprehensive animation techniques that led to some of the most realistic-looking 🍌character movement of the decade, but socially as well. It has genuine cultural cache, especially with queer and female gamers who have so long been excluded from meaningful representation in the triple-A gaming space.

It was important to gaming as both an industry and a medium, but Grounded 2 reminded me that it was just as important to me personally. Time away from the game had made me forget just how moving the story and characters were and why I still consider it to be my favourite game o💛f all time. Surprising myself, I welled up several times watching audiences react to trailers and gamep🎉lay as I remembered how integral the sequel was to my understanding of what video games could be.

Seeing sapphic love in a video game, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:seeing trans characters represented with 🍌empathy, and seeing a story that portrays women as being just⭕ as capable of bloodlust and violence as men was revolutionary at the time because nobody else had dared to do it in triple-A yet. Naughty Dog, for all its flaws, bravely based a story around women🐼 who weren’t written for the consumptionꦯ of men.

Despite the game’s now fraught legacy, given its and Naughty Dog’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:recent focus on endless remasters, the game still had a clear message on 168澳洲幸运5⛦开奖网:the cycle and consequences of violence, and told a story unlike anything told before. It reestablished that Naughty Dog is on the cutting edge of video games, and could both tell a good story and have good gameplay ꧋mechanics. When critics held itꦆ up as the game of a generation, it was deserved.

The Cost Of Game Development

Grounded 2 also goes into detail on how much the people involved in the game’s creation had to suffer just to put it out into the world, and it makes me seriously wonder if this cost was worth it. At what point does a piece of art – in this case, an iconic video game – stop being worth making? Making art is always hard, just by virtue of the process. Making video games is also extremely hard. There’s a reason developers say that every shipped game is a miracle. The amount of iteration and experimentation that has to go into a game as revolutionary as this one is astonishing, but it’s not just that. It’s the fact that the conditions req🌌uired to make it in the time it took to make it were so brutal.

I wrote recently about how the first Grounded documentary was astonishingly blase 💃about Naughty Dog’s crunch culture. Grounded 2’s trailer suggested that the newest instalment w꧋ould be more honest about the reality of the consequences of crunch, but it didn’t go into as much depth as I hoped it would. What it did describe, though, was worrying on its own. We see game designer Emilia Schatz saying, “I’m realising that I can’t crꦯunch like I used to”, and saying she feels burned out. The documentary discusses how it started providing dinners to employees staying past office hours as the studio started crunching. Some employees wonder out loud if they’ll ever finish the game or if it’s simply too ambitious.

We also see Naughty Dog quality assurance lead Patrick Goss saying, “When we onboard people, we tell them that we have a reputation as a studio for crunching, and it's something that we don’t want. And it's something we're not going to do anymore.” Steps to fix this problem include hybrid working, boosting the production department, regular questionnaires about whether workloads are manageable, and the elimination of crunch dinners. It’s a big development if these moves are successful in eliminating crunch culture – Naughty Dog is known to be one of the most innovative studios in the business (if you don’t think about the𝄹 fact that its last few releases have all been remasters) but it admits it lags behind in work-life balance and worker welfare, and will continue to do so as long as it enables ♎crunch.

The documentary makes it obvious that the game was extremely hard on its developers. Not only was the production cycle so stressful that the people working on it feared it would be the game to sink Naughty Dog entirely, but the game faced leaks that led to actors and developers getting ꧙graphic death threats, leading to intense emotional distress. Neil Druckmann describes that he barely pulled through the process, especially when he was receiving ꦡthreats while isolated from the studio during the pandemic. Taking the game in this context, I really have to question if the emotional and mental toll taken by the people involved was worth it.

Who Decides If A Game Was Worth Making?

I want to reiterate: I’m glad this game exists. It changed the landscape of the gaming industry, opening the triple-A space to real, meaningful diversity in a post-Gamergate world. It redefined standards for animation, physics, and visual fidelity. It was hailed by many as the first truly cinematic game, for better or for worse. But there was real human suffering required for it to be brought into the world, and Grounded 2🔯 only makes it clearer that every game comes at a cost.

It’s easy for me, as a consumer, to say♔ that the game was worth the pain it caused. After all, all I have to do is play the game to reap the benefits of other people’s work. But it’s not forꦺ me to decide if the game was worth the pain – that’s up to the people that made it. And I hope that the developers who paid the biggest price to make this game get their chance to speak openly and candidly about what it really means to sacrifice your safety and health to create something held up as the new standard for video games.