After deciding to stay dark for roughly a year and a half, Naughty Dog and Sony haven’t been shy about releasing new content from The Last of Us Part II since the big release date reveal during PlayStation’s State of Play stream a few weeks ago.
On top of revealing the release date, Naughty Dog has shown off a few minutes of new gameplay, revealed new gameplay details, and new infected enemies. To no one’s surprise, there has been a ton of new things added to the sequel to 2013’s Sony exclusive, and the new elements that have already been revealed are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what’s new in The Last of Us Part II.
One of the biggest new features in TLOU Part II is regarding how infected enemies approach combat with both players and NPCs, as they’ll work together to take their targets down. As for how that’ll work, well, Neil Druckmann, who is the creative director at Naughty Dog, explained the new gameplay element during a recent interview with PlayStation’s official blog.
“We have Runners that close the distance quickly,” said Druckman. “We have Clickers that move slowly but are one-hit kills. Shamblers provide this area of attack, where they have this cloud of gaseous acid that burns materials around it. It burns your skin. The way you saw it in this demo is that they’re mostly on their own. It gets really interesting because you have a cloud that hurts you when you enter it, but it also blocks your view, then Runners burst through it. So the combinations get really interesting.”
In the first game, players would typically only encounter two types of infected enemies: Clickers and Runners, and occasionally, Joel and Ellie would have to deal with Bloaters. But, while players would occasionally have to deal with all three enemy types at once, they would never work together to take their enemies down. So, it’ll be interesting to see how they work together when the game hits the PlayStation 4 next year.
The most recent footage of The Last of Us Part II revealed that attack dogs will be featured in the game, but, as of this writing, we don’t know if we’ll have to take on dogs who are infected, nor do we know if any other animals will be included in the highly anticipated sequel.
The Last of Us Part II is currently scheduled to be released for the PlayStation 4 on February 21.
