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The Last of Us: Part II will not use shivs in its apocalyptic weapons arsenal, and Ellie will use a switchblade to down enemies instead (via VG247).
In the first game, the shambling yet deadly Clickers could be killed if Joel wrapped together a pair of scissors and some material to make a shiv. Creeping up and stabbing that shiv in the neck of an infected enemy was the bread and butter of a stealthy sprint through the game, but the new game won’t have shivs at all.
‘Ellie’s switchblade was just so signature to her character, so we actually were really challenged with how we could make stealth against Clickers challenging, while still allowing her to get stealth kills against them as if she had a shiv,’ co-game director Anthony Newman told VG247. Unlike shivs, Ellie’s switchblade is unbreakable, so Naughty Dog needed to ramp up the challenge of killing a Clicker.
In The Last of Us, how fast Joel walked would not affect how loud his movements were, so long as he was crouched in stealth. Now, Ellie will need to ever-so-slowly approach Clickers to close in on them. ‘So you’ll notice we really are emphasising how slow you need to move. Clickers are a lot faster than they were in the prior game, so messing up is way more deadly. So you really have to be practised at half-stick, which is a skill that’s kind of difficult to pick up,’ Newman explained.
It seems that the new game stresses that, though Ellie is skilled and survival-hardened, she is not invincible but players will learn and adapt to the world she traverses. ‘One thing I’m really excited about is raising the skill ceiling of the game,’ Newman added. ‘So basically there’s a lot of stuff where, you may not even pick up on it in your first playthrough, but as you learn more and more about the game, the difference between someone who’s just playing the game for the first time, and someone who really knows how the systems work, we really tried to make that difference as big as possible, so that there’s always something new to experiment with.’
The Last of Us: Part II will release on February 21 2020 for PlayStation 4.
