Winter [SPOILERS]

Winter may have been my favourite season. Unlike the rest of the game, I felt it was an almost perfect chapter in terms of story and had some of the best gameplay (one of the few times I successfully stealthed an entire section).

I absolutely loved that David (the boss you fight in the burning building) let you know that all those bandits in the city you were killing had families and were just really looking for food. That they were really no different to you I thought was awesome. This point was already apparent but the weight of it didn't really sink in for me until you talked to him. I love the idea that the fodder enemies in a game are just as important as you. That they all have their own individual stories, not just an insignificant and finite part of Joel and Ellie's.

But then I thought it was kinda crap that David ended up being a pedophile. I guess they felt a true evil bad guy was necessary considering you never actually have one in the game to fight against?

I don't know, it felt so unnecessary to the overall story. He was already in such a grey area having reverted to cannibalism to feed his tribe and seemed to be the guy in the story who represented little moral code but justified it with spirituality instead of purely survival like everyone else. It felt enough for him to go bananas on Ellie in the burning building considering she had killed his beanie wearing friend (along with half his tribe) and broke his finger.

But no, rapist at heart so machete him a bunch to the head.

Spring.

Fuck that guy he deserved to die

Um, keep in mind that the food they were looking for also included people to kill, butcher, and eat.

Sorry, but that community was going to collapse eventually anyway, really didn't seem like they were trying to build anything new, or sustainable. Just go out and hunt and kill, just like those in Pittsburgh.

It's still a grey area, but it's a lot of bad on top of bad, hastily justified by the need to survive.

I just kept thinking that in all those cities with those stupid hunter societies, someone could have raided a library for books on pre-industrial agriculture and food production.

@muttjones: Yep they shouldn't have made David super evil mcmoustache and should have just kept it at cannibalism. Now if he wanted to raise Elly for the hopes of eventually reproducing that would be alright since there's apparently almost no women amongst the hunters outside of multiplayer; but all that pet nonsense was pretty stupid.

To me, him saying everyone in the camp has a family was just a bullshit lie to get you to trust him

Yes they probably had families, but then again - they were all bloodthirsty human-eaters. So no, fuck that guy and his stormtroopers.

I got the impression that he wasn't actually a pedophile, but rather trying to repopulate his group (didn't see many women with them). She's young and most likely has gone through puberty, so she can carry children and give birth more than a women that is older.

Still extremely fucked up, but I wouldn't say he was a pedo.

And I also got the impression that him attempting to rape her was revenge for her infecting him (she bit him, afterall). Once again, still fucked up

This could just be me going overboard with reading inbetween the lines?

@naru_joe93: Ideally that would be the impression everyone got but him touching her on the hand weirdly plus the auxiliary dialogue from the grunts from Arkham City sort of screwed that up. Again nothing wrong with trying to reproduce but could have been done in a more straightforward fashion. Of course Ellie's still ultimately more evil for having killed yet another group of survivors for the benefit of a few; but it could have been less of the Godwin factor.

Oh, you mean, he was just a rapist, not a pedophile.

David is played by Nolan North! A good job he did of it too.

We've had this argument before. Not gonna do it again (the joel and ellie being more evil than the hunters thing).

Nope

I wanted to see David turn, you know, just for the irony.

Then his face got turned into hamburger meat, win some you loose some.

@h0lgr: I said it was fucked up. I never insinuated otherwise

@naru_joe93: In that case let's agree that Bioshock Infinite sucked ass.

The "oh shit" moment when David recounts the story of his community getting attacked by a crazy guy with a girl has to be one of the best story-based moments in recent video games.

Just perfect.

I HATED the beginning of Winter. The last season ends with a huge cliffhanger, where its unclear if Joel is alive or not.

Then winter has you hunting a stupid deer for 5 minutes, followed by a bunch of dumb shooting sequences >:(

The rest was ok though. But the first part really annoyed me.

The character of David had a lot of potential and I think they could have gone in a more interesting direction but the way they solved it was okay. Not great but not really bad either.

Playing as Ellie was definetely my favorite part of that game though and it was the only section I was able to clear just by being stealthy. You really get better at the gameplay over time and it was at the point where I considered playing through it again right away just for the sake of playing it, that I realised that I actually like the mechanics in a Naughty Dog game.

The deer hunting sequence was a nice change of pace too eventhough I took way too long to bring it down which is totally my fault.

At the beginning of the chapter I seriously thought Joel was dead.

@dark said:

It's implied that he goes so crazy during the chase for Ellie because she bit him and the fungus is slowly kicking in - although I'm not sure if the ND "god" said anything about how Ellie's immunity works.

Those guys were assholes. They attacked Ellie and Joel at the school with no provocation, so when winter rolled around, I was already in fuck you guys mode.

Everyone always pegs him as a pedophile but I always saw him as deranged rather than explicitly pedophilic.

Winter made me wish this game had a face, so that I could punch it. Story wise it was magnificent, but playing it was frustrating as hell.

This, I think its more of a take what you can get. Also even the guards think he is crazy, if you listen to their conversations. So he might not be the best example of the whole community.

Also I didnt get a 'attempted rape' thing, I got Elle trying to suduace him, because she realized what he needed her for. But that was it.

Did anyone else get a Dead Rising vibe from the David chapter and boss battle?

I love everything about Winter.

I thought it was the most simplistic and "already done better" part of the game.

The best part was the "boss" battle just because it was done in an interesting way but was really easy too- I would agree, though, making boss battles interesting in the context of a cinematic game like this is really complicated though so I give them props for their twists on that in general through out the game.

Story wise I thought it was interesting but didn't break new ground. Most of it I had already seen (arguably better written) in The Walk Dead game that Telltale did and the whole thing with David was so obvious from the beginning.

It's interesting that you felt impact from the things David tells Ellie. Let me give you a little insight on how psychological warfare works. If you tell someone the people they are killing are people to, with lives, a child and a wife. "They are just trying to get by- just like you." Then you potentially start to empathize, maybe even feel bad about them. That's it's purpose. It's especially effective if you are tired and beat up (physically or emotionally) but that isn't necessarily required. Anything not 100% true is a lie. They were bad people, whether they were "just people trying to survive" or not is irrelevant. Joel was also a bad person. Ellie was becoming a bad person and she didn't like it. The difference, though, was Joel and Ellie didnt eat other people. I may have been better persuaded if they didn't all shoot at you on site.

So ya story wise it was ok, but not great to me, and game play I did not think it did anything amazing. Although I feel that way about most of the game there were a few story beats I thought were clever, but not in Winter.