Alpha Centauri. They’re not the focus of the game, certainly, but the quotes and background texts actually tell a pretty awesome story, and do it well, especially considering the limitations of fitting that story into the game.
While I agree, this was an on-rails action adventure game. Decisions that impacted the narrative were never part of TLOU. They are almost never part of this type of game actually.
The recorder mentions that they’ve had other cases of patients with elevated levels of Cordyceps in their blood who did not develop fungal infections in the brain, so for starters Joel was not lying when he told her that there were other people like her.
It also indicates that elevated levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines are typical of infected patients but are absent in Ellie. This gives a hint that what makes Ellie immune is a mutation of her cytokine receptor genes. If that’s the case then it’s tremendously important to keep Ellie alive, not to remove her brain. In particular it could be possible for her to pass along the immunity to her children.
My guess is Marlene was kept in the dark about this which is why she supported the plan. My reaction in the game while creeping through the hospital and hearing the recordings was “Oh my god, these researchers are completely incompetent. They don’t understand their own test results. I need to save the girl and then sick a competent IRB on the doctors to shut them down!”
I just assumed all the competent researchers had died leaving the three stooges behind to run the hospital.
I think Ellie was very experienced and morally mature, but I also think she would have sacrificed herself regardless if it was a 1% chance or a 100% chance that the cure would result – she had ‘chosen one’ hope combined with survivor’s guilt and was being railroaded into surgery without hesitation or opportunity to consider any other possibility.
I also imagine that throughout Joel’s post-plague experience that miracle cure rumors and charlatans were everywhere and the Firefly doctors were an extreme example of yet another false hope with hidden agendas. He has far more human-nature survivor experience than Ellie to sniff out a bad egg. That they bonked him on the head and wanted to rush surgery with no discussion or even letting him see Ellie was especially fishy.
The choice usually isn’t there to begin with, though. Circumstances force your hand. This game actually puts you in a place where you have a choice, but if you try to make that choice, the game just won’t continue.
They also don’t tend make you participate in absolutely horrible things. Even in Bioshock, where the whole theme was the lack of choice, they made what you did not very bad–Ryan was a shitty person, and he flat out wanted to die. And, even then, the game will take over for you if you refuse to shoot.
Here that’s not the theme. You are led to believe you are really deciding for the character. You’ve made this type of decision (whether to kill to save her) multiple times throughout the game. And you can’t make it now.
Hell, it was just the end. There’s very little you had to do. You want to make her death pointless, you can do that. Make the player want to keep her alive, by making the other ending suck–they can’t find a cure. That’s what good video game writing would do–take advantage of the medium.
Instead, it feels like they thought you’d be all too willing to participate at the end.