After being so quiet for so long, and giving us all a glimmer of hope that we might have rumbled them, Naughty Dog have finally broken their silence on exactly what is going on with The Last of Us 2.
It’s been heavily hinted and assumed in the past, but it looks like we have a definitive answer on the fate of a Last of Us sequel. With voice actor Nolan North accidentally saying he knew about the game and Naughty Dog writer Josh Scherr blurting the name out on a video stream, it seemed the game was a done deal.
Now, in an interview with Official Playstation Magazine, Naughty Dog’s Creative Director Neil Druckmann has come out and officially confirmed what many expected – that the game was in development, but it was halted for work to begin on Uncharted 4.
He says:
When Bruce [Straley, co-director] and I moved over to Uncharted 4, we were brainstorming ideas for The Last of Us 2 with characters; ideas for TLOU 2 with Joel and Ellie; ideas for a sci-fi game; ideas for a fantasy game, and building prototypes for each one of those ideas, and just as we were getting close to settling or narrowing that list down, we were asked to work on Uncharted 4.
When asked if he planned to go back to the ideas, Druckmann stated that his main focus was Uncharted 4, and he wouldn’t even consider starting work on The Last of Us 2 until a few months after its release on 18 March 2016.
So there we have it. It looks like the game will probably happen, just not for a long time. Bugger. But at least we have Uncharted 4 to look forward to in the meantime, so it could be much, much worse.
Mark is the Gaming Editor for UNILAD. Having grown up a gaming addict, he’s been deeply entrenched in culture and spends time away from work playing as much as possible. Mark studied music at University and found a love for journalism through going to local gigs and writing about them for local and national publications.