Field Notes – The Last of Us

Muchmoore:

• I joined the stream right around the time that Joel and Ellie meet Henry and Sam.
• Muchmoore was discussing how the TV Show changed Pittsburgh into Kansas City and discussing why the changes happened – the TV show filmed in Canada, no bridges which Pittsburgh has a lot of. The showrunners decided their Canadian location looked more like KC than Pittsburgh.
• Joel, Ellie, Sam and Henry are moving through a hotel.
• Muchmoore spends a lot of time looking around for loot in the hotel. Everyone else is waiting in the stairwell when they are done.
• Muchmoore himself is comparing the scene to the tv show and discusses the slight changes
• Muchmoore discusses how he enjoys the tv show and the game and thinks the changes in the show help keep it fresh for people who played the game while still keeping the essence of the game
• After looting the hotel, they wander through a toystore where Sam and Henry disagree about Sam getting a to keep a toy. Muchmoore is yelling at Henry to “let him have the damn toy”. Outside the toy store, we encounter some enemies. He takes down all three enemies through the use of stealth and does not shoot any of them. Muchmoore is making fun of the guys he’s strangling while he does it.
• There are only 9 people in the audience while this is going on but there is some pretty frequent discussions, mostly centred on the tv show.
• We arrive in a safe house after killing some enemies where we rest and experience some cut scenes.
• After leaving the safe house, we go downstairs and find two guys around a fire barrel. Joel and Henry kill them quietly while Muchmoore is taunting them as we come up behind them.
• 6 enemies are killed and we finally see Muchmoore fire a shot, albeit with a bow and arrow so there isn’t a full-out gunfight.
• There is a heavily armoured vehicle searching for us
• All four characters are trying to climb up a semi-truck with half a ladder. Joel boosts Sam, Henry and Ellie up but when Ellie is climbing the ladder breaks. She makes it up but Joel can’t. Henry chooses to take Sam and abandon Joel. Ellie jumps off the truck and stays with Joel. Muchmoore is swearing at Henry (albeit lightheartedly) for abandoning us.
• We evade by sneaking into what looks to be a sports bar. A couple of soldiers come in and search and are able to be taken out by stealth.
• The characters move into an office building and take out two more enemies by strangulation and sneak out of the building. We are spotted by the armoured vehicle which is chasing us and opens fires. It’s a mad dash to the bridge.
• The bridge has fallen apart and we arrive at a cut scene where Ellie and Joel jump in the river
• They are pulled out of the river by Sam and Henry. Joel pulls a gun on Henry and threatens to shoot him. Ellie is telling Joel not to because they saved them while Muchmoore jokingly is yelling at Joel to do it (this is all a cut-scene).
• Joel searches the beach including an old boat and finds supplies and a note from the old crew.
• The group of four then climbs the rocks into an old sewer
• Joel has to do some swimming and open some gates, as well as find a bored for Ellie and then we have to get some power to get Sam, Henry and Joel across the water
• We get into a fight with some zombies and end up getting split up (Ellie with Henry and Same with Joel)
• We encounter some zombies which are probably the people who used to live in the area we stumble upon after killing them. The four get reunited
• We wander through the sewer a bit and find an old place where it seems like some families used to live. Looks long abandoned now. The zombies turned quite a while ago
• We end up running through the area with a hoard of zombies chasing us. Henry and Joel fight them while Ellie tries to get the door open. She was able to climb through a grate too small for Joel or Henry.
• In this zombie fight the player uses a combination of nail bombs, Molotov cocktails and shotgun blasts to kill the zombies.
• After escaping we are finally out of the sewer and outside. In the cutscene, we see on the outside of this door a warning not to enter the sewer we just escaped from because there are lots of zombies there.
• The player talks about different things to do with both the game and the show. In one part of the game he reaches a dam and Joel finds his brother Tommy. He compares this scene to the TV show where they did not have this scene but instead incorporated the town of Jackson right away. He also discussed how the game makers had planned to have Jackson play a bigger role in game 1 but found the town too intensive for the first game so saved it for Game 2.
• Player knew what was something but memory wasn’t perfect as they would sometimes pre-empt things too early. There were multiple times when the person prepared for a fight but did so too early or didn’t get to the point of the fight and he would often laugh or comment about how he prepared way too early.

IGN

• The IGN guides are different as it is purely someone playing but there is no streamer or person talking through the game. That being said, the player seems to be more of an expert than Muchmoore as they knew exactly where to go and when to go there to find everything you may want. 
• In the IGN guides, they avoid contact as much as possible. There are multiple sections (Outskirts, Part 1 as a prime example) where I got into big firefights with FEDRA and in the gamer guide, they killed one guy and just snuck around everyone else without engaging or benign spotted.

Muchmoore: 

It is clear from the actions of the person playing that they have played the game already themselves and also potentially researched things.

The player is, like me, kind of a bad shooter so it’s nice seeing a player who is doing a twitch stream who is a bad shot. I would assume players doing a stream are much better than me and while he is at many things, he isn’t at shooting. He makes plenty of self-deprecating jokes about the quality of his shooting.

IGN:

As this is a guide for players to watch, the player is obviously quite good at the game. They move quickly, take down enemies with ease and work through each scene as quickly as possible while still finding all of the hidden treasures. I also think the player is playing on an easier difficulty than they are capable of as there is very little hesitation and even the scenes where they are forced to fight, they handle quite easily. Most importantly they are patient and could find the right window to run and avoid the fight.

Muchmoore:
The player approached the game from a critical lens but with a lot of humour. It was clear from his dialogue that he has played through the game multiple times as he made comments about things that happened later in the game. He examined the game through two lenses based on his dialogue: Comparing the TV Show to the game and examining the dialogue and responses of characters to events as he sees real life people would.

IGN:
The biggest surprise I had while watching the guide was the amount of conflict the player avoided. Whenever I saw people or zombies, I assumed I had to kill them before I’d be able to move on from certain scenes. I actually yelled out a couple of time because there was one scene that took me forever to get through because I ran out of bullets and had to kill everyone by stealth or melee and I kept screwing it up. Then I watched this guide and the person killed one out of the five people and just snuck right by everyone else in about 35 seconds and it drove me nuts after the amount of times I died there, and the amount of time I spent trying to kill those guys.

More experienced players were more adventurous in each area, looking for ammo and other supplies in places I would have never looked and also tended to avoid conflict and use their stealth much more often than I thought I needed to or was capable of doing.