So what's the point in The Last of Us?

[DjinnFor]

Even if a vaccine was made, who is going to transport it in large enough quantities to matter? Planes are gone. Cars aren't especially useful. There are still bandits roaming around all over the place.

The game is about desolation and the end of times destroying all pretense of human morality whilst a few sad saps struggle to find meaning or hope in survival. About as original as repackaging sliced bread as far as zombie games go, but this is actually a pretty routine and obvious theme throughout the game.

So it's not entirely out of the question that the fireflies might be willing to grasp at anything that gives them a little hope.

 

[Woodsey]

Why do people use logic against stories?


Like... really?

This is just like trying to use logic against 4th edition rules of D&D.

Elves don't get Trance which is a fey ability because they are no longer part of the fey.

But at 21st level they get fey abilities.


Don't use logic when it comes to stores/games. It just ruins it.

/Fixed errors, silly keyboard.

Well, first off, let's none of us listen to this.

Secondly, they can't outlive the zombies because more people are caught and by them, and people are caught out by them because they need supplies. Seems pretty obvious to me.

 

[Ikasury]

hope...

'bout the only reason i could say, people want/need hope, so they'll cling to anything, even if its illogical... no one in the story is thinking about 'after' they get her X place they're just using it as this week's goal in survival, they've all lived in survival mode so long they most likely aren't thinking two steps ahead unless its in a combative situation... having 'hope' or something to represent it is a bargaining chip, its power, its control... its NOT logical, its not supposed to be because that's human nature...

i've accept long ago that people in stories are idiots, but without that level of innate stupidity events and 'stories' would NOT happen, and while i'd like to think people aren't that dumb 'normally' as some of the protagonists i've seen (who seriously just seem to LACK common sense for the sake of plot .-.) i also know that people are innately stupid, instinct driven, emotional non-logical creatures that will run whichever way they 'think' is right... so yea, waiting out the 'infection' sounds like a GREAT idea, then you realize people are fucking retarded, someone's gonna fuck up and they're gonna be infected and then you're back to square one, ideally having a vaccine could/would prevent the effects of said fuckup... realistically it'd be used to 'cure' the 'chosen ones' and people would fight over it, killing millions, getting more infected, killing those with the ability to actually MAKE the cure, and again, back to square one...

also, have you ever tried using Fire to get rid of fungus? does not work -.- the upper part, the visible 'mushroom' part will probably be destroyed, but the underground part, the actually ALIVE and infectious and evil part would still live one, pop up somewhere else and start all over... fungus is evil, and i was actually very 'happy' about this use in this version of 'Zombie Apokalypse number 253082479t3' because there's a weird sort of logic to it and it IS creepily possible... more so then some crappy retrovirus that 'reanimates' the dead... for all we know fire could make it spread, as the universe likes being a dick, meaning all those moltovs i threw to kill that group of clickers just fucked the world some more XD

 

[Miss G.]

The old vaccinations were hit and miss. They largely consisted of finding somebody with the disease and injecting a bit of their pus into people as a means of building up antibodies. It tended to fail a lot, i.e. people just got the illness. Also, didn't have a good travel distance for the most part. Limited area.

Louis Pasteur and Edward Jenner were doing a lot more than that in the 1700 - 1800's man. It was a lot more complex than that even at that stage.

Hypodermic needles made out of wood, probably.

Well no you're completely wrong. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blsyringe.htm

Seriously? If you don't even know what you're talking about why bring it up?

There is no manufacturing at all.

The have the means though. If they can get a hydro-electric dam up and running they can fix the machines used for manufacturing.

And the vaccine development part is insanely complex. You know, killing the thing that causes it and injecting people with it.

Yeah it is, and it was complex when Louis Pasteur successfully developed anthrax, smallpox, cholera and rabies vaccines over 200 years ago.

That's the vaccine most people think of. Not very easy to make.

No it isn't but finding somebody with an immunity is actually a huge step towards it.

Requires a lot of specialized knowledge and research. They can't get someone off the street to do it.

Yeah and they have doctors.

It's still a hopeless hope, though. I'm not so sure these 'doctors' of theirs really know what they're doing. The title of Doctor in this world could just mean someone with even slightly more medical knowledge than the rest of the sickos and survivors hanging around. After all, the hospitals were among (if not the first) places hit by the infection and these people performing the surgery (due to their young looks) could've just been med students fresh from college at the time of the outbreak or jr. nurses/assistants. Not exactly comforting. Ellie is just the latest of other people they've since dissected like particularly expensive frogs and they still haven't gotten a clue. Still, for all we know the infection is incurable or pretty damn close to it and they just haven't had the good sense to give up yet. It could be like the Black Plague where you just have to be smart and wait it out and maybe more people will be born with a natural immunity to it like the afore mentioned plague.

 

[lacktheknack]

How would the vaccine even be made to begin with? Where would they even get the very expensive medical equipment and raw materials (all those fancy medical compounds I cannot pronounce) to even make one vaccine?

You're kidding right?

You do understand that the prices and expenses of medical equipment are completely based on arbitrary inflated modern costs of labour and medical corporation oligopolies?

You think a MRI really costs $40,000 dollars per scan? You think some vaccines really cost more than 200 dollars a pop?

Get real, man. If you're going to think about a fictional story with "real life logic" in tow, try to first understand what you're talking about.

You understand that most vaccines require billions in research to create right? That's why they cost so much. Same with medicine. They're also not something any random person could create in a lab, especially with the entire manufacturing and trading sectors of the world gone to bananas (especially 20 years after that when the world has been reduced to scavengers.)

The original vaccine was a popped cowpox blister that was scraped onto a child to see what would happen. Cowpox is itchy, but harmless, and happens to create antibodies that hate smallpox as well. It's like how having sickle-cell disease will make you immune to malaria.

Likewise, "infecting" them with what Ellie has will cause an immunity to the zombie infection as well (in theory).

Ellie is immune to the infection, and they think they know the source. If it acts like literally other bio-organism, merely introducing the substance into the patient's blood will do the trick, so all they have to do is extract any odd chemicals from Ellie's tissue, which isn't hard. Heck, if Ellie is blood type O-, they literally just have to scrape part of her into one of your cuts.

 

[Miss G.]

How would the vaccine even be made to begin with? Where would they even get the very expensive medical equipment and raw materials (all those fancy medical compounds I cannot pronounce) to even make one vaccine?

You're kidding right?

You do understand that the prices and expenses of medical equipment are completely based on arbitrary inflated modern costs of labour and medical corporation oligopolies?

You think a MRI really costs $40,000 dollars per scan? You think some vaccines really cost more than 200 dollars a pop?

Get real, man. If you're going to think about a fictional story with "real life logic" in tow, try to first understand what you're talking about.

You understand that most vaccines require billions in research to create right? That's why they cost so much. Same with medicine. They're also not something any random person could create in a lab, especially with the entire manufacturing and trading sectors of the world gone to bananas (especially 20 years after that when the world has been reduced to scavengers.)

The original vaccine was a popped cowpox blister that was scraped onto a child to see what would happen. Cowpox is itchy, but harmless, and happens to create antibodies that hate smallpox as well. It's like how having sickle-cell disease will make you immune to malaria.

Likewise, "infecting" them with what Ellie has will cause an immunity to the zombie infection as well (in theory).

Ellie is immune to the infection, and they think they know the source. If it acts like literally other bio-organism, merely introducing the substance into the patient's blood will do the trick, so all they have to do is extract any odd chemicals from Ellie's tissue, which isn't hard. Heck, if Ellie is blood type O-, they literally just have to scrape part of her into one of your cuts.

If it was that easy, why didn't they just use the all other patients that came before Ellie?

 

[lacktheknack]

How would the vaccine even be made to begin with? Where would they even get the very expensive medical equipment and raw materials (all those fancy medical compounds I cannot pronounce) to even make one vaccine?

You're kidding right?

You do understand that the prices and expenses of medical equipment are completely based on arbitrary inflated modern costs of labour and medical corporation oligopolies?

You think a MRI really costs $40,000 dollars per scan? You think some vaccines really cost more than 200 dollars a pop?

Get real, man. If you're going to think about a fictional story with "real life logic" in tow, try to first understand what you're talking about.

You understand that most vaccines require billions in research to create right? That's why they cost so much. Same with medicine. They're also not something any random person could create in a lab, especially with the entire manufacturing and trading sectors of the world gone to bananas (especially 20 years after that when the world has been reduced to scavengers.)

The original vaccine was a popped cowpox blister that was scraped onto a child to see what would happen. Cowpox is itchy, but harmless, and happens to create antibodies that hate smallpox as well. It's like how having sickle-cell disease will make you immune to malaria.

Likewise, "infecting" them with what Ellie has will cause an immunity to the zombie infection as well (in theory).

Ellie is immune to the infection, and they think they know the source. If it acts like literally other bio-organism, merely introducing the substance into the patient's blood will do the trick, so all they have to do is extract any odd chemicals from Ellie's tissue, which isn't hard. Heck, if Ellie is blood type O-, they literally just have to scrape part of her into one of your cuts.

If it was that easy, why didn't they just use the 12 other immune patients that came before Ellie?

Touche.

The point I'm trying to make is that vaccines aren't as insanely hard as the other guy seems to think they are.

 

[MammothBlade]

So to keep it spoiler free, I'll just give a brief overview of what's poppin' off in LoU. Ellie is immune to the fungal zombie plague and so the Fireflies want to use her to make a cure. Whether they failed or succeeded, Ellie is treated like humanity's last hope for most of the game...but why? The fifth stage of the infection ends with the zombies becoming fused to the landscape and unable to move or anything else. Humanity can just outlive the zombies, then strap on some gas masks and roam around with a squad of flamethrowers, cleaning out infested areas.

Even if a vaccine was made, who is going to transport it in large enough quantities to matter? Planes are gone. Cars aren't especially useful. There are still bandits roaming around all over the place.

Am I missing something? Is there some way that a vaccine could actually do anything significant for the world as it is?

The same could be said for any zombie apocalypse story involving a cure, so why bother calling out The Last of Us in particular?

Where there's a will (of the imagination) there's a way. What information has been deliberately omitted or totally falsified? There might be a secret laboratory somewhere which can engineer just enough quantities of an airborne retro-viral vaccine to be dropped from one of the few surviving aircraft. It might not save those in the last stages of the infection, but those still walking around could be saved, or maybe, wiped out with a biological weapon which leaves human survivors intact.

 

[Strelok]

-SNIP-

How many outposts did Ellie and Joel encounter in just the year they spent on the road, even the Firefly research station at the end was pushed back to the last building. Interesting to know more about this fictitious fungus though, if it is anything like the real one it is based on which causes ants to go to well used trails or back to the colony to lie in the sun and wait to pop creating more spores.

Close to the end we discover some survivors resorting to cannibalism so that leads us to believe that there is not much food left and the harsh winter has likely killed any crops (at least in that area) that would produce food. So where would you get food? Back to the populated areas that the fungal zombies congregate? Waiting it out is not a viable option I believe.

Say the last of the human race hasn't systematically killed each other (what I find to be the main theme of the game, and that of Metro 2033/Last Light as well, when faced with a crisis we will be the agents of our own destruction), and most or all the fungal zombies have entered the final stage and release spores, just a part of the earth's estimated 7 billion people that reach the final stage release spores into the air, come summer a major jet stream passes right over the US and Canada. Just from what we saw in the 30 or so years the game spanned I don't think humanity was in good shape, and after the ending... Well those that finished, already know.

 

[mmmikey]

Am I missing something? Is there some way that a vaccine could actually do anything significant for the world as it is?

Well, it seems like ND overlooked how fungal infections work. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that a bite wound would give you a fungus infection. You'd be just as likely to get an infection from any open cut/wound, breathing it in, or even just being exposed to it (the vast majority of fungal infections are generally on the skin and can be spread through contact). Considering it seems to be extremely infectious/contagious, humanity would've been completely screwed at the outset of the game (think of the American chestnut tree). But then there's no game.

I was a little more annoyed by the fact they never really seem to make a point of determining how the infected distinguish between the non-infected and themselves. Especially when clickers are involved because their sense of sight (and smell I would have to guess, considering their entire face is a fungus colony) is gone. I will say near the end of the game I somehow managed to have a Bloater attack another Bloater, but I have no idea if that was their AI mistaking a friendly for a foe or a glitch.

It seems a huge stretch to think that whatever surviving medical personnel are around in 20 years after shit hit the fan would have the means to a cure/treatment when the world before the massive outbreak couldn't come up with a solution. But if they did I think it would take generations of slowly working their way out, but mostly having people come in, in a controlled manner to make mankind as a whole immune.

The more likely solution is whatever small amount of mankind doesn't die from exposure to the fungus, mate and repopulate.

 

[Bat Vader]

Shhhh. Stop that. I see his points and while they story is flawed. It's still a good one.

Besides there will always been groups dedicated to finding a vaccine to any virus no matter the state of the world.
If you can save a few hundred lives. Then it's probably worth it. Why? Because you can now start building towns that have people that are immune and start taking back the world little by little.

Gotta start some where.

Not really. Manufacturing has completely collapsed. How would the vaccine even be made to begin with? Where would they even get the very expensive medical equipment and raw materials (all those fancy medical compounds I cannot pronounce) to even make one vaccine? And keep the vaccines on ice (they need to be kept cool to not turn into poison basically)? You can't just throw a bunch of science-sounding stuff in a test tube or syringe and have a vaccine. The equipment necessary is insanely complex.

Zombies "cure" storylines are almost always ridiculous. This is why "Shaun of the Dead" and "Zombieland" are still the best zombie movies ever made. Because they were honest about the whole thing.

Shaun of The Dead and Zombieland are good films. Honestly I think if somehow a zombie uprising did happen it wouldn't get more than a few dozen or couple hundred people before an armed group such as the military, citizen militia, ETC were to kill all the zombies and destroy whatever caused it.

 

[Mister K]

Why do people use logic against stories?


Like... really?

In my experience (at least with myself) analysis of the logic in a movie, or a book, or a game comes from dissatisfaction with said book, game or movie. If you like the story, characters (and in case of games-gameplay) you forget about logical flaws. But if you dislike them, then you start "nitpicking". To understand what exactly is wrong, probably.

As for OP's question: to show that humans are monsters, that we are bad bad creatures and other pseudo-intellectual themes.

 

[pandorum]

So to keep it spoiler free, I'll just give a brief overview of what's poppin' off in LoU. Ellie is immune to the fungal zombie plague and so the Fireflies want to use her to make a cure. Whether they failed or succeeded, Ellie is treated like humanity's last hope for most of the game...but why? The fifth stage of the infection ends with the zombies becoming fused to the landscape and unable to move or anything else. Humanity can just outlive the zombies, then strap on some gas masks and roam around with a squad of flamethrowers, cleaning out infested areas.

Even if a vaccine was made, who is going to transport it in large enough quantities to matter? Planes are gone. Cars aren't especially useful. There are still bandits roaming around all over the place.

Am I missing something? Is there some way that a vaccine could actually do anything significant for the world as it is?

The vaccine, if it could even be developed with most technology gone or borderline useless, properly tested, manufactured on a mass scale, communicated to the public, distributed without further killing/outright war over who gets it, is a hopeless cause. Man has lost more of its humanity than even the infected and there is no real cure for that. Joel was surprisingly the only one doing something humane in the end, valuing the life of someone who has become a loved one even if it seems selfish to the detriment of everyone else.

Looking around and finding one of the doctors' journal states that Ellie is the 13th or so patient that they've found was immune to the worsening of the infection. After slicing up 12 people's brains, in horrible medical environments no less, they have found scant answers to really combating the infection. Ellie would've been slaughtered like the rest for nothing and then they would've been looking for/banking on lucky number 14, all for a species so far gone (with so few exceptions like Tommy and his community) that it deserves extinction by way of each other, and even ecologically never has and never will make sense in relation to the rest of nature.

The ending isn't as bleak as it looks, though. The presence of flora reclaiming the land and fauna (like the giraffes that obviously adapted fine to being out of zoos/relocated from Africa) remind us to get over ourselves and that a future without people by no means is the same as 'the end of the world'.

In short, life has been here before us and will go on without us, hence the title, "The Last of Us".

Where is that journal that you mentioned as I have just completed but did not see it. On topic you hit the nail on the head.

 

[Miss G.]

Where is that journal that you mentioned as I have just completed but did not see it. On topic you hit the nail on the head.

I forget where exactly, as I was watching a someone else's play through and the player stumbled upon it while looking for Marlene's voice recordings. It looks like its on a big counter near the room that contains Marlene's recorder 1. Its the doctor's recording.

EDIT: I listened to it again and he didn't say a number but he does mention 'other patients'. I admit that sometimes I hear things that aren't there, so I went back and took out the number from my previous posts. Ellie's specific handling of the infection was different enough for them to get excited to harvest her, though and his tone just sickened me, like she was his key to being put history books (that I sincerely doubt anyone is still printing) and to be back in control. They should still just let it play out like the Black Death and let other naturally immune people pass on the required genetics to the generations to come as IRL these descendants are immune to AIDS and other harmful things because of it.