In the plot The Last of Us Part II There is a moment when the player in the role of Abby is chasing Tommy. He settled somewhere far with a sniper rifle and runs away from the pursuers-it is assumed that the user cannot catch up with him.

However, Utubert Speclizer managed to break the scene, grab Tommy and even kill him. At this moment, the logic of the game falls apart, since Tommy should not die, and further passage becomes impossible.

The video caught the eye of the technical designer Naughty Dog Escher Einhorn (Asher einhorn). He worked on the episode with the pursuit for a very long time, told how she was born, and even showed shots from prototypes. Next – quotes Einhorn.

The roots of the episode go to the prototype of the system with the enemy-sniper, which I did back in 2016. This character was supposed to appear at several levels and occupy a new position if you saw that you are too close to him.

When the character ran away, he was looking for another high point, and his friends tried to make you go to the place where the sniper would be convenient to shoot at you. It was interesting!

A little about how the prototype worked. I manually set small points with good places for a sniper and handed them out ratings depending on the rays and distance to the player. When you were approaching a sniper, he ran to a point with the highest assessment.

At some point, we tried to turn it into a battle with a sniper-boss. Nile [Dracmann] suggested that it should be Tommy. I liked the idea very much, but it has changed a lot.

Tommy should not have died in this episode, so that we faced an extremely difficult task: to create a battle with the boss, where you will not only not win, but you can’t even shoot at the boss. This is a realistic game, so if you get into it, and he will not die, then you will instantly understand that he has a “plot armor”. This would destroy the tension of the moment.

We had a bunch of versions of a more open space, but it was not possible to deal with all the problems at once. Therefore, we began to do something more linear. I’m not a level designer, so I chose a place in the Harbor of Seattle, but the surrounding artist Todd Foster [Todd Foster] collected on this basis a quick draft from blocks. I moved the elements to create a very rudimentary first version.

There should have been a huge office with huge windows on the left, from where Tommy shoots. It was assumed that you would get on the roof of the building on the right, where Manny will die in a fraction of a second while you run through a row of doors.

Moreover, before you walked the opposite way, https://nodepositbonuscasinos.co.uk/100-free-spins-no-deposit/ climbed the stairs on the right and passed through the bridge, hiding behind a cart with a load. After the chase through the far left building, you would return to the original space in the middle for the final battle. I would like to find a video with this version better, but it did not work.

In the end came Morgan Wilson [Morgan Wilson], a wonderful level designer responsible for the final version [scene]. He very much transformed the pace and made it much more efficient. He changed some points and created the final shootout in the hall of the Maritime Station.

Thanks to this, I was able to focus on the script. The entire episode uses many custom scripts, and Tommy controls the controller: he kills the player when he is outside the right zone, and punishes the player if he tries to shoot at Tommy.

We made sure that everything seemed honest, so in almost all moments Tommy manages to take a position before the player can get to a good view point. Thus, you cannot find out that Tommy is literally invulnerable – he shoots at you almost immediately, as you are trying to aim at it.

We were very worried that such moments would seem annoying, so we emphasized everything with remarks of the characters warning that you did not do this (the system for votes did here Morgan Wilson). General rule: so that everything seems honest, Tommy should already aim at you.

And something else cool. There is a special system, twisted to the limit: when Tommy misses you, it deliberately enters the destroyed object next to you, due to which Tommy seems very dangerous. Well … it’s just cool.

There is also a custom script so that the cars sway when they get into them.

Another cool moment with a bunch of custom scripts. Tommy shoots at objects next to the player to attract infected. Tommy’s behavior is scribbled so that it misses a lot, when you are not in the shelter, fight with infected and do not try to shoot at Tommy.

Before that, it was simply infuriated when you come across infected in an open place, and then Tommy kills you. We do this in many of our games: if we understand that the player is trying to play well, we reduce the pressure on him.

Manny is tuned here so that he can kill everyone at all. Thanks to this, you are attached to him before … something bad happens to him. Our work on partners came in handy here, but I also make him attack the closest enemy in the center of the screen.

And yes, there is still a script that softly slows the animations of all infected, except for the closest. Used to get too large crowds if people tried to run away. Therefore, I made such a script that the distance appeared between the infected people.

Now about the battle in the lobby, where Stremer caught up with Tommy and caught it! This section, frankly, was obscene to get to work as it should, but it was interesting to create it. I love this. We wanted to convey the feeling that you are about to catch Tommy, but it is because of your rush that Manny dies.

If this zone was larger, more universal, then creating the whole scene would be easier. But I wanted to support the vision of the space that Morgan had, so cunning scripts were needed.

This is how everything works. The scene has a bunch of regions that make Tommy run to carefully verified points. He runs away on the basis of a bunch of things: distances, lines of gaze, and we finally allow the player to shoot at him. We wanted you to think that only to scratch Tommy, so here he has a lot of custom reactions to shots, which is why he always dives back into the shelter-you will not be able to stun Tommy hit.

I used a set of special positions, each of which is based on different distances and spaces where Tommy could stand up or escape. It turned out that in many places it is better not to run away when the player is close, but get up and defend himself.

Tommy also has a custom controller for shots when he is in shelter. This made it possible to set the rhythm of his shootings from Manny. […] You can see the debug of this controller at the top of the screen.

We really wanted to create a feeling of how you and Manny work together to surround Tommy and drive him into a corner. There was a replica where Abby shouted: “There is nowhere else to run, Suchara!»She was cut out, but I always laughed after her. Probably not quite the reaction that was conceived.

We have created a lot of special fixes and settings for a bunch of places so that you could not catch Tommy. That is why the problem was returning all the time: each place had its own separate fix.

The testers were so good that they still continued to find new ways to catch Tommy. But since for this you need to outplay the episode hundreds of times, then, I think, in fact, everything is in order with it.

In my opinion, this segment is slightly spoiled: it does not have enough duration to “breathe” the whole excerpt ”. It seems to me that there was a larger space where they would more actively force the route and move zigzags. And much, much more destroyed things that Tommy would fall when trying to shoot a player. In general, this is not quite like a fight in a lobby from "Matrices", which I looked at, but I hope that it turned out anyway cool.

I thought a lot about this episode after the release, because it has so much work, but this work is almost invisible. We made the player stop doing what he was doing the whole game before. It turned out to be very difficult to ensure that this.