Get ready to survive Seattle in a ton of new ways: The Last of Us 2 permadeath is coming in just a couple of days, and that’s not the only new gamemode that’s coming to Naughty Dog’s epic third-person shooter.
“We’ve loved seeing all of you share your experience playing the game, whether it’s by posting your thoughts and impressions on social media, sending us your fan art, or capturing your favorite moments in masterfully choreographed gameplay videos,” read a blog post from Naughty Dog. “However, that’s not all that’s been keeping us busy. We’ve been preparing a new update* for The Last of Us Part II, which introduces new features, gameplay modes, Trophies, and more–including the much-requested return of Grounded difficulty.”
What is Grounded difficulty? If you’ve never played the first game, it can be likened to Hardcore Mode in other some other games. Ammo, upgrade materials, and crafting materials will be much harder to find, and enemies will a heck of a lot deadlier to boot. Elements of the HUD will be deactivated, and certain tools like Listen Mode will be disabled. This new difficulty setting will be available from the start, but that won’t apply to all of the new content.
The Last of Us 2 permadeath is also arriving in just a couple of days. Yes, it really works like you’d think you have to complete the entire game start to finish without dying. If you do die, you’ll have to start over from the beginning.
Naughty Dog has done a lot of cool stuff with accessibility, though, and so there will still be options for players who might not be up for the greatest of challenges. An optional The Last of Us 2 permadeath mode with checkpoints on a per-chapter or per-act basis will also be available.
Also arriving in this upcoming patch are some new graphics, audio, and gameplay monitors. More than 30 new graphics rendering modes (and several new audio modifiers) will allow you to change the look and sound of the game at the press of a button. For example, you could make the game look like it came from the 8-bit era (as seen above). There’s no word yet on if you can remove the terrible requirement to kill dogs, though.
Unfortunately, these new options won’t be good to go right from the beginning — you’ll have to beat the game at least once to unlock them. For now, you can check out the trailer showing off The Last of Us 2 permadeath mode and more below and get hyped for the new content coming on August 13, 2020.
