Ellie's enemies in The Last of Us 2 will force you to make tactical choices as well as moral ones.
The latest in-depth documentary video goes "Inside the World" of the upcoming game. It contrasts Ellie's home of Jackson County, Wyoming with her eventual destination of Seattle and the broader Pacific Northwest, and it also delves into the inhabitants of those places - both human and not so much anymore.
The two main factions that Ellie will clash with - at least the two that Naughty Dog is willing to reveal so far - are the Washington Liberation Front and the Seraphites. The former are inhabitants of Seattle and beyond who survived the apocalyptic outbreak under a harsh military quarantine, eventually rising up against the army and seizing their equipment. The Seraphites are a religious group who see the infected as a reaction to the world's sin.
"The WLF has a lot of military equipment that they're able to use to defend this area, and they have large numbers, whereas the Seraphites are very quiet and stealthy," director Neil Druckmann explains in the video. "They're able to use the large amount of foliage to their advantage, and they fight more with this kind of guerrilla warfare."
Fighting the Seraphites sounds terrifying, especially as they turn Ellie's stealth tactics around on her. Probably not as terrifying as the infected, admittedly.
"Infected are still a threat in this world," Druckmann said. "We first wanted to take the basic classes we had in the first game and say, 'What's different about them now?' So we'll have scenarios where we'll have way more runners, sometimes hordes of runners coming after you. It might be about just escaping because the odds are overwhelming. This thing just keeps mutating, there's certain evolutions of infected that you haven't seen before, for new classes."
New types like the Shamblers, who burst into acid clouds when you get too close, will force you to make rapid decisions as the battlefield changes shape. Naughty Dog wants fighting against infected to feel just as intelligent as fighting against humans.
"If you just go in guns blazing and throw caution to the wind, you could easily get overwhelmed and regret that strategy," Druckmann said.
For even more on the game, check out our final preview of The Last of Us 2.
