![]() It couldn’t be missed and it was very understandable as to what was happening. The ambush animation itself was very clear and very sudden the player was grabbed by an enemy and entered into a button-mash struggle that filled the screen. I was getting great reactions for the ambush moment itself, so I knew I was on to something impactful, but the initial testing showed some interesting discoveries about how clear it was.Īnother one of the rules from my original article was: The reveal of the subversion must be clear, concise, and sudden to avoid any confusion and maintain the drama. I asked some other designers to play it and act exactly as they would if it were the real game pick up ingredients, craft items, upgrade weapons at workbenches and upgrade player abilities with any upgrade manuals. It had lots of scavenging items including parts to use at the workbench. It had evidence of people living there, such as hanging clothes and repurposed structures like makeshift toilets and tents. I created a small environment that was a hide-out inside an abandoned office building. We also talked to Derek Mattson, the scripter on the workbenches, and he supported us too by providing us with a unique workbench that would show the initial menus, but let us run a custom ambush setup afterward. Luckily, they were both on board with the idea and keen to help as they thought it was really interesting and something worth testing, given how it supported the initial ‘loneliness’ brief. I approached my scripter and my animator on this section at the time, Banun Idris and Jonathan Cooper, and pitched to them my idea, what I wanted to achieve, why, and what I needed them to do to help me prototype it. I did the very risky thing, and usually not recommended, of asking people on the team to invest time and effort into work that hadn’t been approved. The safest course of action would have been to pitch it on paper first, but I knew this wouldn’t have anywhere near the impact I was aiming for in the final game. To give someone the desired reaction from subverting their expectation of a learned mechanic they needed to experience it first hand. I knew that to have the biggest impact when pitching this event it had to be playable. ![]() At this stage, players had also got complacent that the workbenches were ‘safe’, so it was a good place to introduce something that would ensure they were engaged. This workbench was the 8 th workbench at that point in the game, so it was well within the established pattern rule. My original article talked about 3 being the smallest pattern you can have, so the earliest time you could consider subverting expectation was on the 4 th interaction with the pattern. One of the rules that I discussed in my first article was: You should have established a pattern before considering subverting the pattern. ![]() I didn’t want it to just be a random jump scare out of nowhere, but rather subverting player expectation of a learned mechanic (the workbench upgrade menu) in order to create a memorable moment that strengthened the Last of Us Part II world and narrative through gameplay. I wanted the player to go into an apartment that was currently being occupied, take all the items from these people, then get ambushed whilst Ellie’s back was turned and she was vulnerable something that wouldn’t have happened had Dina been with her. The physics dumpster puzzle was created as a twist on the buddy mechanic of opening a garage door together. I initially thought about showing a ‘buddy boost’ opportunity to reach a higher ledge that the player couldn’t use on their own, which would require a dumpster to progress, which then led me into thinking about how I could emphasize loneliness in a puzzle. I thought about the mechanics we had that involved a buddy character and how I could use them to make the player directly feel firsthand the drawback of being by themselves. I started to think about ways I could emphasize the player’s loneliness through game mechanics as I believe the strongest way to tell a story is through engagement with the gameplay mechanics and the gameplay beats themselves a particularly strong point of Naughty Dog games. I had a brief for this level that Ellie should feel alone as she had left Dina behind in the theatre and we wanted to emphasize what Ellie would sacrifice in order to pursue revenge. I worked on 4 levels in “The Last of Us Part II”, one of which was called ‘The Seraphites’ where Ellie left the theatre by herself in search of a character named Nora whom she wanted to exact revenge on.
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