After a week filled with leaks, Naughty Dog has finally given The Last Of Us fans their first official look at Part 1's gameplay. The ten-minute video includes interviews with some of the team who have worked on the remake, and details exactly what has been improved upon. The AI of the game's enemies and the people you meet throughout its story has been vastly improved, and that's just the start.
The initial reveal and the leaks that have come since had some people fearing Part 1 would be little more than a visual improvement on the original game. The video below demonstrates that while how the game looks will be a huge part of the remake's appeal, some big changes have also been made to the gameplay. As expected, elements have been pulled from Part 2 and incorporated into Part 1.
“It has sophisticated systems for things like the fundamental knowledge model of how these NPCs perceive and understand where the player is,” game director Matthew Gallant explains. Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann adds that the goal is to make these encounters feel more intense as enemies better interact with each other and utilize their surroundings in a much more realistic way.
The same applies to buddies you meet throughout Joel and Ellie's story. The way they react to those enemies will be much more realistic. Not only will they aim to stay out of an enemy's eye line, but they will move from place to place based on where they think the enemy is going to go next, something Gallant labels "future exposure". He also describes a new feature added to the game called motion matching. Logic that pulls from hundreds of animations to find the one that best matches a player's movement in every single frame.
While the visuals and the AI improvements are the headliners here, you'll see in the video above that there is a lot to be excited about. Druckmann reveals Part 1 will introduce two new modes, permadeath and speedrun, plus a tonne of new unlockables allowing you to change Joel and Ellie's looks. Part 1 will also have even more accessibility options than the original game too, and the team believes it to be the first PlayStation game to ever have audio description built into its cinematics.