We’ve seen the extent of Artificial Intelligence in video games, all the way from Horizon: Zero Dawn to Assassin’s Creed, and how it is evolving into something much more than just ducking and shooting.

Naughty Dog usually are the ones to pioneer and revolutionize the way we see these AI – in 2013’s The Last of Us, enemies were very intelligent and you could use stealth effectively with the clickers using sounds instead of line of sight to look for you.

Naughty Dog are back at it again, with their new title The Last of Us: Part II being showcased at this year’s E3, two years since its original announcement. Following the demo, which featured some cultists searching for Ellie, lead game designer Ricky Cambier took part in a Q&A, telling VG247’s Kirk McKeand about the extremely ambitious and impressive AI we are seeing in the sequel and the new technology that powers it.

“We look at how different communities survive, what motivates them, what drives them,” Cambier elaborated, talking about the religious undertones to that of a cult such as the one featured in the trailers and demos for the game. “You see in our own world how religious groups unite over certain things, so you see this group is united over some religious themes. You can see by how they talk, how they dress, there’s some unity amongst that.”

There seems to be a major emphasis on “how they talk”, as in the gameplay demo showcased at E3 2018 the cultists labelled Ellie as “wolf” – this is a form of encoding their communication so eavesdroppers won’t understand what they are talking about. The cultists will also use whistles as a way of relaying information to one another. They are “people surviving, they know each other.”

One of the most unique traits if the fact that each enemy knows the others name and can recognize them, which is groundbreaking in terms of modern-day video game Artificial Intelligence. We have yet to see the implementation of Machine Learning into video games, but for now this is a huge development in AI usage. You can see an example of the name-calling in the demo, where one enemy refers to another as “Ethan”.

The Last of Us: Part II does not have a release window as of yet, and is exclusive to PlayStation 4.