In Joel's situation, I would have done the same thing. Humanity's never done Joel any favors as far as I can tell. Actually, throughout the game, Joel loses everyone he's ever cared about to other humans. Now it wants him to give up the only person he has left, and a person that's actually saved his life on a few occasions. And for a POSSIBLE cure by an organization with a not so good reputation, not a guaranteed one? Do I even know how the Fireflies are gonna get that cure around? They couldn't even handle getting a little girl around and had to rely on Joel. Fuck em'.

That's a good point. Marleen says something like "That's what she would want" which kinda gave me the indication that Ellie wasn't aware that she was about to be sacrificed. Maybe I would have let Ellie take her own decision, I know that's a lot to ask of a child but Ellie already had to make many adult decisions throughout the journey.

It is perfect.

I will do the same for my childrens.

Reading what some of you guys did in the game is confusing. Shoot the surgeons? I didn't even know that was an option, I just grabbed and ran. That's the difference in some of this, I spent a lot of the game avoiding killing, sure I took out the zombies but a lot of the time I just ran around them.

The thing that to me changed stuff was near arrival to the University Hospital. Before this time it was very about survival but this was against humans, another group of people trying to survive. I thought, "Why are these idiots attacking, the idea of a zombie-fied future is to survive, not needlessly attack people." Then when you met the leader of the group and he mentions about a crazy man and girl companion, I thought, yes Joel was acting angry, vengeful even.

In the end, Joel had been through everything to get to this place, lost people, just to lose another but then he'd gone so far what is a little further? While I don't think I would have done it that way, I certainly understand why he did it (basically I didn't agree with her dying).

That is the key bit for me, 'He did', I didn't do the final actions of the story, I distanced myself from his character. Just like I did from Walker in Spec Ops, this person wasn't me, wasn't the person I wanted to control.

EDIT: As this is about spoilers, I might have missed it but did they explain why the army guy shot Joel's daughter?

As a father of a small daughter I would have done exactly the same.

I would have done the same thing as Joel. Screw the Fireflies, they weren't very nice to him when Ellie was drowning.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but you're forced to kill the surgeon that's holding the scalpel. Joel won't grab Ellie until he's dead.

Traditional saying *The needs or the many outweigh the needs of the few* It maybe understandable if she was his daughter but she wasn't which makes the decision he made even worse.

Ah, yeah, Joel did that with a scalpel and the other surgeon's called him an animal or something but I didn't shoot anyone. If people did kill the other's... then well, that's just disturbing.

The game heavily implies that the Fireflies are not exactly "nice people" or "noble". Would they have distributed the cure to everyone? I hardly think so. That is assuming the cure actually WORKS of course.

And, even if they did, how they would do that? There's no way of distributing the vaccine around the world. Not only that, but civilization is completely dead at this point. Even with no more infected, I hardly think people would go back to being "people", instead of just animals fighting for survival. Hell, many people would probably not even agree to take the vaccine.

Not only that, but the world took EVERYTHING from Joel. Ok, so let's assume best case scenario - the cure works, everybody takes it, the infection is gone, civilization starts rebuilding itself... and then there's Joel, with NOTHING left AT ALL. Great life huh?

tl;dr: the world is too fucked up to be fixed and Joel already suffered too much.