Yeah they pretty much dropped the idea of finding a cure. Maybe there will be a third, I don't know. I liked moving away from Ellie and Joel, I mean, they had their game, if you can't surpass the standard you set then you have to redefine the standard. Obviously this was gonna piss off manchild gamers but I think it's cool when developers take risks and do things different. I also liked being forced to see things from Abby's perspective, I came to like her when she turned on the Wolves but I found everyone else in the Wolves less than endearing. The message about violence is somewhat open to interpretation, I felt like they were making a statement about what's normal in video games, insofar as all the random senseless violence you take part in and then don't really have to think about, which is really apparent in Uncharted, Naughty Dog's other big IP. Like they just picked one random NPC you killed in the first game and gave him a whole backstory as a way to say "here, this is what violence does." If you take it as "violence begets violence" then yes that's true but that's not really much of a statement, if you take Ellie's ultimately rejecting to kill Abby when she had the chance as a statement of like anti-violence or something then that is a little jarring compared to all the random enemies she killed along the way. I don't much care for letting plot holes ruin my experience but I do think it would have been cool for them to shift the focus of the gameplay away from killing people, maybe with Ellie going through some sort of personal realization that maybe could have started with the killing of Joel. Plus there would still be plenty of infected to kill so the game could still have all the cool guns and shit. Idk