If you’ve been reading our weekly Ask PSLSes frequently, you may have noticed that Resident Evil 4 is the game I’ve replayed the most, with it also being my favorite video game of all time.
So, when I saw that Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley told Kotaku about The Last of Us how they “needed a Chainsaw Guy from Resident Evil 4…somebody that was just gonna destroy you when you touch him” when referring to clickers, it (ahem) clicked with me.
As I realized, and Bruce explained, “we weren’t getting the tension that we wanted. Without the one-hit kill, we just weren’t getting the tension, the stakes weren’t high enough for people.” Thanks to Naughty Dog including the clickers, it made The Last of Us much more difficult and memorable, but as Neil said, they weren’t even in the game to begin with:
There were two things. We didn’t have an enemy like the clicker, and we had a push-off mechanic, where as you were wrestling with infected you could push them off. And by removing the mechanic and making the clicker one-hit, all of a sudden you had all this tension. And people were now using all the stealth mechanics that initially they were just not using.
Would you have preferred the clickers not be able to kill you in one hit? Let us know in the comments below.
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