Sure, getting the cure would have killed Ellie but saved humanity Joel chose to save Ellie instead, even if that's not what she would have wished for herself. That's the crux of the conflict between Joel and Ellie throughout much of the sequel and in the spaces outside of it we only learn how Ellie found out about this fact, and how she felt about it, towards the end of the game. Indirectly, by depriving the world of the potential cure locked up inside Ellie, he's responsible for countless more deaths. Joel has, through the players' hands, murdered tons of folks by the time The Last of Us: Part II rolls around. Sure, that's heroic from the point of the player who just spent untold hours escorting both Joel and Ellie to safety, but in the wider world of The Last of Us, Joel is a straight-up villain. The entire point of that journey is that Joel came to care for Ellie as a surrogate daughter, to the extent that he killed damn near everyone in that hospital - armed or not, militia member or not - just to keep her safe. At the end of that trip, Joel, unchanged, would have simply handed Ellie over to the Fireflies, collected his payment, and returned to the life of a smuggler. And yet it's Joel's time in the Hunters and the Smugglers that's given him the tools of the trade he'll need to keep Ellie safe on their trip west. Once upon a time, Joel and Tommy were members of the Hunters, a brutal survivalist group known for ambushing, killing, and torturing 'tourists' in their territory for supplies and information. Ironic, that, because Joel, widely seen as the hero of the series, wouldn't have quit, he would have soldiered on. Because the rest of the game asks simply, 'What if we had met Abby first? What would our perspective look like then?' you are missing literally half of the story if you opt out at the first sign of unpleasantness. But to deprive yourself of the rest of the game and lock yourself into a spiral of hate not only misses the point of the game itself but does needless irreparable harm to you, dear player. I get being upset with developers for that specific decision I wasn't too pleased with it either. I get being angry at that moment you're supposed to be. However, that moment also apparently gave those same people carte blanche to trash the rest of the game, sight unseen, often without any specifics for fear of admitting their own vulnerability. That's the moment that caused untold numbers of people to put the game down out of anger, hurt, sadness, frustration, whatever, and never pick it up again. You know the point I'm talking about, but I'll lay it out here anyway: It's Joel's death at the hands of Abby. Admittedly, most of the people who started a playthrough of The Last of Us: Part II and then gave up did so after one particuarly specific point.

The last of us part 2