The Last of Us Evidence

The Last of Us - Evidence for an Unsubstantiated Claim

Let’s take a look at a couple of combat scenarios, through the lenses of both total stealth and all-out aggression.

An arena with three runners and two clickers presents a solid challenge to try to ghost your way through. The runners don’t have super-sensitive hearing, but they do have the amazing power to see. The clickers are the opposite – they can’t see you, but you have to move very slowly around them. This gives you plenty to contend with – you need to step lightly around the clickers, but also make sure you stay out of the line of sight of the runners. At the same time, you need to move at full crouch speed behind a roaming runner to get close enough to strangle it - but you obviously can’t make your move if the runner is near a clicker. You can try to move the runners to an ideal location with a brick or bottle, but the clickers, with their hearing, will always move towards the noise as well. All this means that there is no one optimal stealth solution for an encounter like this. When you kill either type of enemy, you’re always taking a risk – a runner might see you, or a clicker might hear you.

Which is when you’ll need to start shooting, and the way these enemies work in combat is particularly brilliant. Runners do low damage and charge at you quickly, while clickers kill you in one hit but flail around quite slowly. This means that the clickers will always be the last enemy to reach you if you start running around the arena with a bunch of enemies on your tail. It creates this extremely organic repeated scenario where you deal with a few weak enemies, then have to deal with one extremely dangerous one to end the battle. In this way, every infected encounter has this natural pacing of the difficulty curve, based entirely on enemy movement speeds and damage outputs.

This is enhanced in the final, lengthy infected battle in the highway tunnel. Bloaters have served as minibosses up to this point, dealt with on their own. They serve that purpose well, having a charge attack up close but punishing you for keeping too much distance with a ranged attack. In the final encounter they’re coupled with clickers and runners, adding to the rhythm – runners charge you, clickers flail, and bloaters lumber along behind both, chucking spore grenades.

Though I have to agree with Mattewmatosis that the Stalker enemies fall flat. It sounds like an interesting stealth challenge to give an enemy both sight and super-hearing, but you aren’t really given any opportunities to stealth past these. I believe it’s possible in the sewers, but they only appear twice throughout the entire game, so you’re unlikely to have learned their behaviours well enough by that point to have much of a chance. It makes sense to include an infected type which can hide, and they use cover in a suitably unpredictable way, but that erratic movement means it’s always best to pull out a shotgun and wait for them to come to you. Being the one enemy with a totally dominant strategy like that, they end up being far less interesting than their concept would imply. A few more encounters with these could have fleshed them out a bit, but at the same time the fact that they only appear twice possibly speaks to how ultimately uninteresting they are.


Let’s take another scenario, a human one this time- there’s a big, open plaza with cover dotted everywhere (specifically I’m thinking of the Financial District bit), an upstairs area with a rifleman wearing body armor, four guys with pistols and shotguns on the opposite side, downrange from Joel, and a molotov dude and a melee enemy to either side.

With listen mode off, you aren’t going to know what you’re up against immediately, so, taking the stealth approach, it makes sense to go upstairs and take the sniper out first. You’ll encounter the Molotov dude on your way up – he’s a sad and pathetic kind of guy, so chuck a bottle to startle him and strangle him from behind. You’ve seen this guy a lot – you pity him, because even when you’ve fought two of him at the same time, your fists have been perfectly adequate. From here, you’ll make your way upstairs and jump in and out of a couple windows to avoid the rifleman, and choke him out too.
The guys with guns are close below you talking to each other – you can’t stealth kill them while they’re facing each other, and you don’t have any nail bombs or molotovs, so it’s time to do some sniping. You pick one off, and get a headshot on another, but he was wearing a helmet.
They being to shoot back, so you drop down to street level, behind some cover. They’ve lost track of you, so you take out your revolver and headshot the guy who just lost his helmet. The melee enemy has run up behind, so now you need to engage him. As you parry his plank with your pipe, you’re shot in the back by the guy with the shotgun, taking out most of your health. You knock the melee guy down, and grab him as a human shield. You turn to face the remaining two guys, and kill the one with the shotgun. The one remaining pistol enemy, running the ‘scared shitless’ script through his AI, kills his buddy you’re dragging around, making him dead weight. Joel drops the body, and you fire blindly in the enemy’s direction, needing to do some damage before he shoots again and takes you out. You hit his leg and stun him. You switch to the shotgun, and blow his head off.

And everything I just described is totally possible within the game’s systems. I’ve moved enemy locations around a bit, and it’s unlikely the enemy AI would make that specific set of choices in that exact order, but it’s an entirely possible scenario.

So you can see the massive differences between both types of encounters, and how they change the way you play. Even the speed of your crouch-walk has to change depending on the type of enemy you’re trying to stealth kill. I’d say infected encounters are roundly outstanding, with the exception of stalkers, while human encounters are best played 30:70 stealth-to-combat – you need to commit to open combat if you get caught, instead of letting the enemies kill you and starting over. An all-stealth human-enemy approach still has a lot of the waiting which plagued Uncharted if you tried stealth in those games, so it’s best to do your best with stealth and then let the battle unfold dynamically, adapting to whatever happens as you traverse each new combat arena.

- Novacanoo