The Dogs You Kill in The Last of Us 2 Have Names

We learned a lot about The Last of Us 2 at the latest State of Play broadcast, which was great, but if you know anything about The Last of Us 2 fans, that’s never going to be enough. They’ll be clamoring for more information until the day it’s released.

Well, I can’t promise to have all the answers, but I do have a few interesting tips given to the folks at Gamespot by writer Neil Druckman, who shared bits and pieces about the game as they played through it.

The whole article is probably worth a read if you’re a big fan of the series, but there’s one specific part I want to draw your attention to: the fact that, apparently, all the characters are named.

That may seem like a normal thing, but when I say all the characters, I mean ALL the characters. Apparently, every human enemy you encounter has a name, which will be used when handing out orders to one another, in-battle banter, and even as something to call out when their friends are killed by you. Same goes for the many, many dogs you’ll apparently be fighting.

The goal, Neil explains, is to make you upset.

"A big part of the theme of the game are the parts of your humanity that are lost or potentially stripped away when you pursue justice. The lengths that you go for justice can have a very high human cost to you personally. And one of the ways I'm really excited about that we're kind of bringing that to life is our named enemies. ...Not only does it show how intelligent they are that they're able to coordinate, but by naming them, they become that much more of a real human."

So if you were wondering if this is one of those games where you can pet the dog… well… bad news.