A developer who worked on The Last Of Us 2 has revealed the team knew about the ability to catch and kill Tommy, detailing the work it took to try and prevent that from happening.
A clip of a player catching up to Tommy during the sniper chase scene in The Last Of Us Part 2 did the rounds online last week. If you have played that part of the game, you will know that Tommy eventually escapes as he is needed for other parts of the story beyond that chase. However, if you are quick and skilled enough, you can catch up to and kill him.
Asher Einhorn, a designer who worked on TLOU2, has taken to Twitter, writing a long thread that goes into painstaking detail regarding how that particular segment of the game was made. It started life as a regular old sniper boss scene all the way back in 2016, three years before TLOU2 even launched.
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This article came out the other day showing a bug where you could catch up to Tommy in #TheLastofUsPart2. I thought it would be fun to use this as a springboard to talk about why that can happen and how the sequence is made in general! thread https://t.co/5Vz978ly2O via @kotaku
— Asher Einhorn (@AsherEinhorn) July 13, 2021
“At one point in development, we were trying to make this into a sniper boss fight, and the idea came down from Neil that this would be Tommy,” Einhorn explains. “Tommy wasn't going to die in this sequence, so we had the extremely difficult challenge of creating a boss fight where you weren't going to win, AND one where you couldn't even shoot him.”
So much thought and detail goes into the fight, from infected moving more slowly in certain parts, to Tommy's accuracy being nerfed when the player is busy battling other obstacles. As for that final part when Tommy was supposed to escape with his life, Einhorn admits it was known Tommy could be caught, but the team hoped it wouldn't be an issue.
“QA are so good at playing the game that they managed to keep finding new ways to get up to him. Still, when you have to play this sequence 100’s of times to be able to do this? Ultimately I think it’s ok,” Einhorn explains. Effectively, in order to create the drama that comes with the scene and the chase, the ability to catch up to Tommy and kill him had to be left in. It just takes a lot of work to do, and as highlighted by Einhorn, it has taken players a full year to discover the exploit. We wonder if it will be patched now that it has been discovered, if that is even possible or really worth it.
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