You thought you knew everything about The Last of Us 2? Think again. It turns out that Naughty Dog’s title still hides many secrets, and one of them has just resurfaced.
Five years after its release, The Last of Us 2 has definitely not finished making people talk about him. Of course, the broadcast of the second season of the HBO series this year undoubtedly has a lot to do with it, as does the arrival of la version PC of the game in April. And the fact is that thanks to the latter, we have today been able to get our hands on a new secret hidden by Naughty Dog until now. Because against all expectations, it turns out that the studio abandoned a lot more things during the production of The Last of Us 2 than it was willing to tell us.
Abandoned animations from The Last of Us 2 resurface
Indeed, if you have played version Remastered of the game released last year, then you have probably already had the opportunity to discover the famous lost levels of the game, restored by Naughty Dog for the occasion. Levels which, in addition to new environments, also featured a series of abandoned animations, particularly in the context of the sequence taking place in Jackson. But things don’t stop there, since modder Speclizer has just discovered that The Last of Us 2 hides a lot more.
By digging through the code of the PC version, the latter actually discovered the presence of two additional animations that had not been kept in the final version. The first, called “Peek Mode”, was intended to allow Ellie to take cover behind an object in order to take a furtive look at the surroundings. Given the gameplay and the camera in use in The Last of Us 2, however, we easily understand why Naughty Dog preferred to abandon it, its usefulness being overall relative for the player.
A very promising mechanic left aside
The second, called “Hold Up”, turns out to be much more interesting. And for good reason, it allowed players to sneak up behind an enemy to take them hostage, with a series of additional options for the occasion. For example, it was possible to make him raise his hands in the air before asking him to drop his weapon, but also to force him to give us some resources or to make him move forward or backward in the direction of our choice. Enough to further strengthen the strategic side of The Last of Us 2’s combat, therefore.
This discovery is all the more interesting since if we refer to the code found by Speclizer, Naughty Dog had obviously made good progress on the implementation of this mechanic. So much so that several lines were even written for the occasion. “Don’t do anything stupid”, “Put your hands where I can see them” or even “Not in noise” were for example part of it, in the same way as a « Salut conn*rd » very much in Ellie’s style. However, we do not know why the studio decided to get rid of this very promising mechanic.
See you in one of the studio’s next games?
That being said, as we often like to say: in video games, nothing is lost, everything is transformed. Thus, failing to have been included in The Last of Us 2, this mechanic could well appear in a possible The Last of Us 3which Neil Druckmann has already been thinking about for a long time. Unless it is reworked with a view to being integrated into Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophetthe next title from Naughty Dog which will feature a bounty hunter with a visibly strong character. The future will tell us.
Source : Speclizer
