Firstly why does it need to be similar? Secondly how do any of these (unstated) improvements outweigh the paucity of the games narrative coherence?
I mean it beggars belief that a determined group of trained soldiers would travel the distance they did to hunt down a particular man to enact revenge for the death of loved ones and then would just assume that having brutally killed him in front of his own flesh and blood and surrogate daughter that there would be absolutely no consequences or pay pack as a result of doing so. If you're that motivated, how much less so anyone else? No, you don't let them live. You quietly execute them, burn/bury the bodies and get the fuck out of there before the rest of Jackson comes a snooping. You sure as shit don't just let them go and at the very least you might wonder what the relationship was between Joel Miller and this young woman you have pinned down screaming bloody murder at you, especially when he was last known to you to be leaving Salt Lake City absconding with a Young Teenage Girl who could well be the cure of the
Cordyceps Virus. I mean did no one in the surviving fireflies known Ellie's name? Did Marlene tell no one here name? Or was she just called Girl #1 or something.
Honestly. The revenge plot is fine, but the way in which it is executed undermines itself by opting for pulp melodrama at the cost of all reason and logic. Have Joel die. Have Joel die by Abby's hand. Have Ellie and Tommy witness it in some form, but for the love of all things holy, don't have it that they survive because they're let go, have it that they survive because of some form of intervention. Jesse, Dina and some other Jacksonites could appear, or a horde of infected attracted by all the commotion. Hell even an avalanche dividing them would be less incredulous versus 'Leave them..it will be fine'