It's often the smallest details in gaming that takes fans from enjoying a certain game or series, to falling completely in love with the developers and their best titles. This has been the case for long running series like Pokemon and Final Fantasy, as well as indie darlings like Undertale, and most certainly appears in Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part 2.
Tiny details, littered throughout the world, are what builds the atmosphere of The Last of Us Part 2, making areas like Jackson and Seattle feel real and lived in. Beyond that, the attention to detail on simple mechanics like guitars and cable physics grounds players into a world that not only feels desolate and lived in, but shockingly real.
Some of these details are hard to even notice in TLOU2Â or might not seem like anything special until players start comparing them to the way other games in the industry tackle these effects. From characters passing each other items on camera to clothes coming off with immaculate fidelity, the cinematic goals of The Last of Us Part 2 required it to have an almost unheard of level of detail. Looking into some of these details will require digging into the story a bit, so there are Minor Story Spoilers incoming.
Passing Items On Camera
For anyone who isn't acutely aware to the little tricks of the trade that developers often use to cover up imperfections, items in games don't often get passed around on camera. Generally, these actions are obscured by having the focus on the character's face as an quest item or money is passed just below the edge of the screen, giving the illusion of exchanging items without having to animate the action. This is often because animating items moving from one hand to another is fairly difficult without it looking awkward or floaty, especially with a massive world filled with items like The Last of Us Part 2.
Regardless of the difficulty of these limitations of the medium, The Last of Us Part 2 almost seems to go out of its way to show players handing off and picking up things like maps, guns, and even babies. It's a small detail, but for anyone who notices the camera tricks that developers try to pull off to hide these exchanges, it comes off as impressive and helps maintain the immersion that the game is trying so hard to create. This level of detail feeds into even more aspects of the game as well, leading to intricate animations and mechanics for features like TLOU2's playable guitar.
The World Reacts to the Player
Another difficult detail that games often ignore, since most players likely wouldn't even notice it, is how the world moves and reacts as the player moves around in it. Things like the grass moving or leaving footprints in dirt is nothing new, but the way that the water works in The Last of Us Part 2 is a thing of beauty for those who enjoy that type of thing. One specific detail is the way the algae in the water will react to Ellie's exact movements as she swims through it, leaving openings where her arms pass through instead of just pushing away in an area around a wide, vague hitbox.
What's so impressive about some of these finer details is how little they appear in The Last of Us Part 2, and yet Naughty Dog still took the time to fully realize the physics and animation around them. This attention to detail is what elevates the graphics to something fans love about the game from start to finish. However, when talking about the way items, plant life, and the world reacts to the players, that still pales in comparison to the cloth physics that the game employs for some of its scenes.
Character Models Wear Clothes
Another trick of the trade for the gaming industry involves the way that character models are rendered with their clothes on, as opposed to being bodies with clothes draped over them. In most cases, if a character is wearing a piece of clothing, that is all the character model will include, and taking off clothes generally requires loading a new model without clothes. However, characters dress down a number of times in The Last of Us Part 2, and just like with the item exchanges, the game doesn't use the usual camera tricks to hid clothing being pealed off.
One controversial scene involving Abby actually shows this detail the best, as the two characters in the scene undress, but the camera never pans away or cuts out to give an opportunity for the character models to change. Instead, the clothes are rolled up and wrinkle before being tossed and flowing through the air to the ground, just like cloth would when being pulled off in real life. It's a level of detail that might be more comfortable to focus on in this scene in particular, considering how awkward the rest of the scenario is on its head.
Why Details Matter
So, there are tons of fans who will play through a game like The Last of Us Part 2 and not notice, or consciously acknowledge, these smaller details, and that actually might be the right way to experience it. Looking to closely at something while experiencing it can open a players eyes to plot holes and inconsistencies that might hamper an initial reaction and are likely better left addressed in a following analysis. However, for the sake of that initial experience, it is incredibly important that Naughty Dog did take the time to add these details, especially if the developer continues to aim towards giving a cinematic experience alongside its games.
Both the original The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part 2 are aiming high to be both a video game and a movie, complete with compelling narratives and sometimes heavy-handed messages about morality. However, to get that across properly, Naughty Dog has to try as hard as it can to make players forget, at least during cutscenes, that they are playing a game and not watching a movie. To that degree, details like perfectly moving algae, or flowing clothes that behave realistically, is a necessary step to bridge that gap between the two mediums.
The Last of Us Part 2 is available now for PS4.
