A recent interview suggests that, without a story that hits as hard as the first two games, Naughty Dog probably won’t seek to make a third single-player entry in The Last of Us series.
The release of HBO’s The Last of Us series has brought the award-winning Naughty Dog IP back into the limelight, which of course, has sparked conversations about what’s next for the franchise.
According to its co-creator Neil Druckmann in a recent interview with Buzzfeed, the future of The Last of Us (outside of The Last of Us multiplayer) comes down to whether or not the team at Naughty Dog believe the series needs a new game.
Druckmann says that they’re ‘very, very privileged’ that their publisher is Sony, explaining that the publisher’s support has allowed the studio to ‘follow their passions’. He continues on to say, “Just because something is successful, people think there’s all this pressure, and we have to make a sequel. That’s not the case.”
He then uses Uncharted as a recent example, noting that while Uncharted 4 was one of their ‘best-selling games’, they were happy to leave it at that. “We’re able to put our final brushstroke on that story and say that we’re done. We’re moving on.”
Druckmann concludes by jumping back to The Last of Us, saying:
“It’s up to us whether we want to continue it or not. Our process is the same thing we did when we did Part 2, which is if we can come up with a compelling story that has this universal message and statement about love — just like the first and second game did — then we will tell that story. If we can’t come up with something, we have a very strong ending with Part 2 and that will be the end.”
So basically, if they can’t think of anything that they believe hits the spot like the end of The Last of Us Part 2 did, they’ll simply leave it at that.
That said, Naughty Dog still has The Last of Us multiplayer game up its sleeve, which will still be canon and feature a “brand new story and cast of characters that live in another city that we haven’t seen yet in the world of The Last of Us,” according to Druckmann. A PC version of the recent remaster The Last of Us Part I also arrives in early March.
So it’s not entirely the end, but don’t be too shocked if Naughty Dog decides to close the book of The Last of Us after that.
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