The Last of Us Part 2 co-director Anthony Newman has revealed how the Sony-owned studio went about beefing up the game’s enemy AI in comparison to the original game.
The Last Of Us Part 2 Enemy AI Improvements
Speaking with UnGeek, Newman explained that enemies now have a ‘vague awareness’ state when they witness a friend being killed, but aren’t able to ascertain where the attacker is coming from.
In Last of Us 2, we introduced this middle state that honored the fact that if someone witnessed their friend getting killed with an arrow in front of them, of course they’re gonna be alerted, they know someone did that. But they shouldn’t know exactly where it came from. T
There’s this kind of middle state of ‘vague awareness.’ So when you play the game, you’ll hear enemies say something like ‘I think it came from over there,’ so they’re kind of uncertain about your location, but they have a pretty good idea of where you are.
This obviously differs from the original The Last of Us, as Newman notes, which only had two states for enemies: knowing where you are and not knowing where you are.
In the Last of Us 1, if you kill someone with a silent weapon like a bow and arrow, you’d have the expectation that no one would know where you were. But if someone saw their friend die, we call it “witnessing a silent kill” — if they witness a silent kill, in Last of Us 1 they would immediately know where you were.
It’s because in that game, we only had two states, enemies either didn’t know where you were at all or they knew exactly where you were.
The Last of Us Part 2 is slated for release exclusively on PS4 on June 19.