Yikes.

It's no surprise that an alternate ending would involve Marlene getting the jump on Joel first, but man, that's fucking rough. Least Joel had the mercy to kill her quick, whereas Marlene is straight-up torturing the poor bugger. Nasty stuff. While it's still just a 'what if' scenario, if this sort of action from Marlene is within the realm of her character, then it goes to show potentially fucked up Marlene had gotten across her travels. She at least shown plenty of remorse about having to sacrifice Ellie, but torturing Joel is still pretty out there, even for her.

Though I assume this image is based after Joel's slaughter of the Fireflies during his rescue of Ellie, so naturally she's going to be pretty peeved off with the guy.

Anywhoo, ND are going to be talking more about ''What could have been'' with TLoU for PAX Prime, naturally including this alternate ending here, so definitely looking forward to that.

Prediction: Joel doesn't kill, or even meet Marlene at the end when he steps out of elevator. He gets away with Ellie. Marlene tracks him down. Joel is unwilling to give up Ellie's location. Joel gets tortured, and Ellie is the one to save him at the end, having to kill Marlene herself.

That ending would have been interesting, but it also wouldn't have that lovely conflicted grey ending since Ellie would know exactly what Joel had done, instead of having an idea that he was lying.

From the articles I've seen, that's actually Tess, not Marlene.

First seen it on this IGN article, and to back it up this videogamer.com article

Guess the entire story was supposed to be drastically different than what the final product was. Interested to hear more.

Yea, that definitely looks more like Tess, but man, even the art is real dark. Great game though!

now I want a whole timeline dedicated to what shifted around the story when.... That's clearly Tess not Marlene.

Pretty drastic shift from what was originally planned to what actually went down.

I really liked the ending they ended up going with, but I'm really interested to see what could've been.

D

L

C

What did happen in those 20 lost years?

Soooo... bang bang kiss kiss?

I didn't even see Joel and Tess as a couple but that's the only way I can describe this.

That is indeed Tess. She was a main antagonist in an earlier version of the game, so it's more of an alternate story, not just an ending.

@eskimo: I thought about that myself. I think they said somewhere that those years would be left to the imagination. I think it was on the reddit ama that they said it, but not sure.