Naughty Dog: “50/50” Shot for The Last of Us 2; “Maybe” Working on Something Else for The Last of Us

Marking what will probably be the last AMA for Naughty Dog’s Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann about The Last of Us, the duo went on Reddit last week to answer many fan questions.

One of the most interesting answers comes from Neil Druckmann, who talked about the chances of a sequel to The Last of Us by saying, “If you’re asking about a sequel… right now I’d say it’s 50/50.”

Druckmann later added that there will be no more single player DLC for The Last of Us, and for a potential sequel they’d need “a good idea for a story that doesn’t repeat what we’ve done, but somehow builds on the original. Short of that we won’t make a sequel.”

At this moment, Neil said that “right now it’s just about trying to figure out what we’re going to do,” and as for where people from The Last of Us team are right now, he noted, “Some people have moved over [to the Uncharted team]… others are sticking around as we go into pre-production for the next game.”

Despite no confirmation of it, Neil had some fun when talking about a hypothetical The Last of Us 2:

There are clickers as big as buildings. Also you have lots of new gadgets and weapons (more lasers!). Oh and Ellie can now control the infected with her new powers. We’d also probably dive into the government conspiracy of creating a secret weapon that broke loose and that’s how the outbreak started. There’s probably a shadowy secret agency in all this that you find out Joel has been a member of this whole time (that’s why he came home late in the prologue!).

Switching over to Bruce, he teased how they’re working on The Last of Us’ third piece of DLC (it’s multiplayer-themed) “and maybe something else… we’ll see ;).”

Straley then answered whether we might see what’s going on in other parts of the world during the outbreak in The Last of Us:

Probably not, but you never really know. If we can come up with a good story that fits into other locations, then we’ll certainly consider it. But in general we try to keep the perspective of the story told from the character’s perspective, so you certainly wouldn’t hear it from some government report… it could be inferred through gossip, but that’s just gossip… who knows??

After discussing how he doesn’t “think mobile development is the future,” Straley said of possibly doing other genres, “I think there are some fertile fields to be sowed in a lot of other genres. I’m personally not interested in puzzle or RPG games, but as far as genre – I’d love to play a great [Naughty Dog] sci-fi game or [Naughty Dog] fantasy game or a mid-sized cartoony game… yeah. I’d love to play/make any of those games. whether we do it is a whole other question though! ;).”

Straley then offered up his thoughts on possibly doing an open-world game:

That’s a hard one… story vs. gameplay and pacing becomes a big issue. Not insurmountable, but challenging. If we think there’s a way we can do it & still get powerful motivations to propel the player and good character moments, then why not?!

Would you like to see Naughty Dog tackle another genre? Let us know in the comments below.

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