When players get their hands on The Last of Us Part 2, they will get to play through the game as 19-year-old Ellie. Co-Writer Halley Gross says that details written into the game emphasize the choices players will have to make in an apocalyptic world where all of the realistic characters are doing their best to survive.
The Last of Us Part 2 continues the saga years after the end of the last game, which involved a lot of difficult decisions and culminates in a lie. Some fans felt like this ending invalidated the moral challenges of The Last of Us, and as the sequel pushes past that point in the story, it's now up to the players how they will react to the new set of dilemmas they will face. Details that the writers included will hit the impact of these decisions home in new ways that haven’t yet been seen in this world.
The Last of Us Part 2’s Co-Writer Halley Gross said that every single Last of Us 2 enemy in the game has a name, and those who are with them will yell their companion’s name when Ellie deals a deadly blow. These details were added to humanize those that Ellie is up against and make players think twice about their interactions with non-player characters.
“Even in gameplay, we want you to feel the micro-hard choices these characters have to go through,” she said in an interview. Players can either choose to have Ellie fight her way through enemies and confront them head on or sneak her way around them and risk being caught.
In the State of Play, Sony debuted for The Last of Us Part 2, the gameplay features two warring factions called the Seraphites, a mysterious cult-like organization, and the WLF, a group of combat-ready militants. The WLF even have trained dogs that the player will need to make the decision to either avoid or kill. During the course of the game, Ellie gets caught in a conflict between them, and needs to decide what she will do to get past them. These people have their own motivations, just as Ellie wants to protect Joel, and might not be bad people — they are all just trying to survive in a hard world to do that.
This choice inclusion of names gives new weight to these decisions that most games haven’t reached yet. Even though Last of us 2 is banned in the Middle East due to the LGBT+ themes in the game, players in other regions can make these decisions for themselves when The Last of Us Part 2 comes out.
Source: Polygon