As if last week’s crazy good footage of The Last of Us Part II wasn’t astounding enough, Naughty Dog has revealed the game’s cult-like enemies have A.I. that know their fellow survivalist loonies by name thanks to some impressive tech that the developer is trying out.
Lead game designer Ricky Cambier spoke with VG247 recently, and detailed this experimental idea and its application in The Last of Us Part II’s Seraphites group.
We look at home different communities survive, what motivates them, what drives them.
You see in our own world how religious groups unite over certain things, so you see this group is united over some religious themes. You can see by how they talk, how they dress, there's some unity amongst that.
Astoundingly, the enemies will use codewords and whistles to communicate without alerting their prey to what exactly they’re up to. Cambier added,
There are religious undertones to how they talk, but also in how they communicate using these whistles. There are these subtleties in there of how they talk to each other and how they relay information to each other. Also, they're people surviving. They know each other
There's some new tech here that we're exploring where AI know each other's names. They're used in certain moments. You see in [the trailer], one of them is called Ethan. When they meet up, they recognise each other.
Naughty Dog doesn’t seem to be resting on its laurels then. Instead, it continues to push the technology to the absolute limit in a bid to make its games just that bit more immersive.
By the time the game actually comes out, who knows what insane details they’ll have added to the finished product? Ellie is the lead character now, but the tech may yet be the real star.
The Last of Us Part II is a PS4 exclusive and will likely be released in the distant future.