Because if we couldn’t make the player believe that these roving bands of survivors were thinking and acting together like real people, then no amount of perfectly presented mocap was going to prevent the player from being pulled out of the game whenever an NPC took cover on the wrong side of a doorway or walked in front of his friend’s line of fire.' Travis McIntosh, 'Human Enemy AI in The Last of Us', Game AI Pro, Volume 2, Chapter 34, 2015. Answering that question required more than just hiring the best voice actors, the best modelers, and the best animators, although it did require all of those things. 'When we started prototyping the human enemy AI, we began with this question: How do we make the player believe that their enemies are real enough that they feel bad about killing them? Answering that one question drove the entire design of the enemy AI. As players make their way across post-apocalyptic America, players come into contact with two types of opposing forces: Hunters - the humans who patrol and control regions of territory around the country and the Infected, the mindless crazed creatures that are all that remain of those infected by the fungal plague.Īs the game began development in 2009, one of the earliest design principles was ensuring that players recognised the dramatic impact of taking another life in a world built atop those that had fallen. The Last of Us is a third-person action-adventure game with a large focus on cover shooting and stealth. In this case study, we're going to explore the inner workings of The Last of Us: the design philosophies that drove its development, the AI technologies adopted and how developers Naughty Dog crafted an experience where players were made to feel the emotional weight of every enemy kill. And while players take charge of cynical and embittered Joel, artificial intelligence helps put together the rest of the dramatic performance, be it ally, enemy or infected. It's a game driven by cinematic spectacle, of human stories set against an inhuman reality. Players must guide Joel and Ellie through a world left in ruin, as rogue factions of humanity war with one another all the while the fungal brain-altering virus that has swept the globe transforms the infected into violent mindless creatures. The Last of Us is one of the Playstation's most revered titles.

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