The Case is Being Made to Justify The Last of Us Part II’s Existence
With today marking five years since The Last of Us released, its worth remembering how difficult it was to envision the game receiving a sequel for anyone who finished it. But anyone familiar with how businesses work should have seen it coming.
It was a self-contained title with a poignant ending that didn’t leave its story open for a continuation. While developer Naughty Dog’s most dedicated fans felt they’d continue with the Uncharted series at the time (which they did), they also felt the company would also move on to another new IP following this game. The story of sci-fi tale “Savage Starlight” featured throughout TLOU was taken as a hint about their next project, especially since its characters bore striking resemblances to Zoe Saldana and Ewan McGregor. But the saying “when there’s a will, there’s a way” applies to the power of consumerism, as there was no way Sony wouldn’t demand a sequel to this title after it sold seven million copies worldwide — and its sales have only continued climbing from there.
The challenge for Naughty Dog, particularly its writers, involved proving to most fans why this game needs to exist, which has been quite a process since its announcement. During the reveal, they merely had to fulfill the job of introducing main characters Joel and Ellie again, and provide clues as to the themes this game will tackle. But for as much as the companies involved wanted to catch eyes with the Paris Games Show preview, it was a misfire that seemed to favor shock value over substance thanks to how mercilessly violent it was. Thus, the job of selling this game’s concept was left to the E3 2018 deep dive, and it did its job mostly well, despite several questions being left unanswered.
The backlash towards the PGS preview showed the need for Naughty Dog to establish more context for the sequences they provide, and they had nearly twelve minutes for that at E3. The demo started with a small party within a chapel in the fictional Jackson Country, Wyoming, the township where the first game ended. (There is a Jackson, Wyoming, though it’s apparently not the same.) It stars Ellie, taking the role of the protagonist now at 19 years old, who shares a kiss with new character Dina. But the scene transitions to Ellie in the wild fighting and dodging other dangerous humans, to show how the world is still as frightening a place as it was in the first game.
The main intention here was to show the number of stealth and offensive maneuvers Ellie has compared to her younger self and Joel in the first game, and how enemies are smarter this time around. Yet from the start of this section, it’s clear Naughty Dog had no qualms in showing off how grisly the game is. The first segment showed her ramming and jamming a knife into a man’s neck, and another segment shows a captive man being tortured and killed, with his intestines hanging out as a result.
It’s brutal, though this is by intention according to creative director Neil Druckmann, as the violence will have an effect on the characters’ psychological states through the game. This will be difficult to convey within the confines of an interactive title, one where the players do the shooting and stabbing — which actually makes the violence shown in the E3 preview more disturbing than in the cutscene from PGS. But it’s not an impossible task for a game (see Metal Gear Solid 3 for a good subversive non-murder simulator encouragement example), so hopefully they execute this concept carefully.
The E3 demo shows how the more violent aspects should be balanced out with calmer moments, though they should also segue into the narrative well and not simply be there for the sake of having those moments. It’s something the first game did well, though this installment is approaching a new level of violence, which will make this process more difficult. The execution of these concepts will have to be done carefully to show how this game doesn’t simply exist to make money — even though that’s part of why it’s happening.
The team is also hopefully working on showing how much its world has developed in the time since the first game ended. The fact that some sort of party is happening in the E3 preview is already a big change, as the first game’s story offered little time for festivities when nearly every other human encountered wanted the main characters dead, and others were busy working or moping. There should be more moments like these throughout the game, though expect the larger focus to be on exploration and killing; this is a video game we’re talking about here.
Sony and Naughty Dog will be leaving E3 without so much as providing a release timeframe for The Last of Us Part II, so it could still be around a year away from release. It’s not coming this fall, and they’ll want to space it away from Days Gone, another post-apocalyptic survival game which releases on February 22nd. This means the team will have plenty of time to further show why TLOU2 truly needs to exist, and hopefully they use it wisely.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
