Designer playing games: The Last Of Us II
UX analysis of the weapons’ related tasks.
The game
The Last of Us II (2020) is an action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog. The game is set after the events of the previous game, The Last of Us (2013), and the player can control two characters that live in a post-apocalyptic world.
In this single-player game, a player can use firearms, improvised weapons, and stealth to fight enemies (humans, dogs, and infected — zombie kind of creatures). The player also interacts with the environment by jumping, climbing, and navigating by horse or boat, using the environment as an advantage to hide or attack.
The player has a variety of weapons to use — long-range, short-range, and melee weapons; attack equipment like Molotov cocktails and smoke bombs; health kits; silencers and “distraction” items (bottles or bricks) — to help them survive.
How do you get these weapons/equipment?
In the craft section inside the menu, it’s possible to craft attack and health equipment, arrows, silencers, shiv blades, and melee weapons upgrades. In the skills section, it is possible to upgrade skills. If the player finds a workbench, it’s possible to upgrade long and short-ranged weapons.
To be able to craft or upgrade, the player needs to scavenge the environment or dead enemies to find the necessary collectible items. The harder the difficulty selected, the harder it is to find these items.
Conditions of play
To begin my analysis, I think it’s important to understand my context. I played the game two weeks after launch on a PS4, sitting in a comfortable armchair in front of my TV of 37’. I was 1,5 to 2 meters away from the TV.
Sometimes, I find it difficult to see stuff (I have no vision problems) in some of the last games that came out, especially PC oriented games. I was forced to get up to read instructions and some dialogue on Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales.
The Last of Us II did not force me to get up, but everything was minimal and a bit transparent. I get the idea of this effort to be the most immersive experience possible and try to hide UI elements. Still, if I lose visual information and that gets me frustrated with the game … away the immersion goes.
This happened mostly at the beginning of the game when you have an environment filled with snow. Can you find the aim of the gun in this picture?
What feature would I improve?
In this game, you need to have the tools to survive. And you need to be aware of the tools you have so you can plan and, in some cases, react to sudden attacks. The weapons slot and craft menu are amazing from the UX perspective. Except for the melee weapon and its upgrade.
Unlike long and short-ranged weapons that the player finds once and can use until the end of the game, melee weapons have a usage limit. The player finds melee weapons and gets to use them a limited amount of times (4times,5times, etc.).
The limit is visible on the screen if you have a melee weapon with you (small dashes inside yellow circle on image 2). If the player exhausts its usage, the melee weapon breaks, and the player has to look for another one.
If the player wants to improve usage limit and damage — the player can craft an upgrade on the crafting menu.
Why analyze the melee weapon and its upgrade?
This flow works very well if you have a melee weapon with you. That changes when you have no melee weapon or when you have an upgrade on your melee weapon.
In both cases, no weapon or upgrade crafted info is not available or hard to read. And I found that very frustrating sometimes.
No melee weapon?
If the player has no melee weapon, no information is shown on screen.
I’m running from one place to another, and I don’t have any ammo or arrows. I don’t see any info about the melee weapon (blue circle on the image 3-left) … let’s check the crafting menu. It just states that I have no upgrade (green circle on the image 3-left).
How do I manage to confirm I do not have a melee weapon?
1) Enter the crafting menu (image 3-left) — the card with the melee upgrade only has a zero, meaning no upgrade done (green circle on the image 3-left).
2) Go to that melee upgrade card (green circle image 3-right) — a new collectible item slot appears, giving me that info. You can see that happening from the left and right green rectangle on image 3.
If you notice the green circle (image 3-right), you can see it looks like I can craft 1 upgrade, but on the collectible items slot (green rectangle image 3-right), the melee weapon is not available. That counter “0/1” induces error.
The player needs to memorize the success case and compare it when nothing is shown to save all this trouble.
What happens when you have a melee weapon?
You have the info shown on image 2 always on the screen if you have a melee weapon.
Enter the crafting menu (image 4-left) and can see info on the melee weapon upgrade card (yellow circle, image 4-left) — look, something new, a white wrench! It can be crafted! Go to that card (image 4-right) and see the new collectible item slot that states that I have a melee weapon (compare the blue rectangles on image 4). Now the melee upgrade card shows further info- I can make up to 1 upgrade (yellow circle image 4-right). Nice!
I need to remember the behavior in this “success” case when I have a weapon to read the info, or lack of it when I don’t have the melee weapon.
Oh, and the game does not stop when I enter the crafting menu! I might be attacked while trying to get the info that requires 1 click + movement and a few seconds to get. And yes, that did happen.
Melee Weapon upgraded?
The next info missing: is the melee weapon upgraded? Remember when I said you need to remember the “success” case. The same thing applies here.
See the yellow circle on melee weapon on image 2-left versus image 2-right? The weapon has scissors around it. You need to remember the differences to be able to know if it has been upgraded. The impact in the game? It’s small info on the icon that can be missed; it translates into thinking you need to upgrade and open the menu only to find out you can’t upgrade because it’s already done.
No melee weapon, no upgrade — no info. Rule or exception?
If you notice the weapon slot menu that is open on image 5, we have info that the smoke bomb is not available. But the melee weapon does not have a place on this menu, so you never get the negative confirmation this quickly.
If the weapon you carry does not have ammo, the info is always on screen, inside the weapon slot. And you can quickly open the weapon slot menu and have an idea of which weapons have ammo/equipment available.
“No weapon, no info” is applied not as a general rule, but as an exception in some cases: the melee weapon and its upgrade, the most obvious one.
What would I do?
I took a look at how that problem was solved inside the game regarding other equipment. I draw a small suggestion on top of the craft menu and weapon slot as a way to illustrate these ideas (image 6).
And this is my suggestion:
On the crafting menu
1) Keep all collectible items’ slots visible at all times. (blue rectangle, image 7)
2) Give info on the item craft state without forcing the player to move to the slot. (yellow rectangle, image 7)
How? Wrench symbol always present (white if can be crafted, red if can’t) + two numbers ever-present (big for item amount owned, small for the amount that can be owned + red if does not have that item, if equals zero, white if has 1 or more).
On the image 6 you can see:
— Health kit: wrench white +1 big + 2 small. Possible to craft 1, max 2.
— Smoke bomb: wrench red + 3 big + 3 small. Not possible to craft. 3 items, max 3.
— Silencer: wrench white + 0 big red+ 3 small. Possible to craft, no item, max 3.
— Melee Weapon upgrade: wrench white + 0 big red + 4 small. Possible to craft, no item, max 4.
— Blade: wrench red + 0 big red + 3 small. Not possible to craft, no item, 3 max.
On the weapons slot
1) When the player does not have the melee weapon or blade, the item should be red. (yellow circle, image 7) I would use the cross with a hammer and an axe that represents the melee weapon collectible on the item collectible slot. But it takes a lot of space, so the last melee weapon used on red is a better option.
2) When upgraded, the item could have a different color on the scissors that hold the hammer — a yellow with some opacity. To be more explicit, the difference between upgraded and not upgraded.
Final Thoughts
I loved this UX. That’s why I noticed this melee issue and couldn’t keep it if off my mind. I do appreciate the immense effort put into trying to reduce the UI to a minimum — it feels like we are not in the game, we are in a story.
But we still need to know information, negative or positive, to help us make decisions. Do I try to attack that enemy first? Do I run away? Do I hide? What I don’t have is as important as what I have when I need to survive.
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