Watch the full documentary Grounded II: Making The Last of Us™ Part II, which takes viewers through the development process of Naughty Dog’s acclaimed sequel, The Last of Us™ Part II. Learn from behind-the-scenes footage of what went into Part II’s development throughout the years, including its launch.
Grounded II is available to watch here and as part of a downloadable patch 1.1.0 (internet connection required) for The Last of Us Part II Remastered, available for the PlayStation®5 console at the same time. For more information, check out: https://www.playstation.com/games/the-last-of-us-part-ii-remastered/
This documentary includes spoilers for The Last of Us Part II.
Neil Druckmann: Okay. Thank you all, for what is about to be a very long presentation. So Anthony and I ran some numbers, and to our best guess, The Last of Us Part II is 10 to 30% longer than The Last of Us Part I.
However, this is the most detailed story presentation we’ve ever done. If you think about the precision for T1, where we talk about the quarantine zone in somewhat detail, and most of it changed. Then it’s like, here are some things that might happen with Joel and Ellie.
They might go into a spore-filled subway tunnel, they might fight some cannibals. At some point, Joel gets incapacitated- This has everything figured out. Even though it might change. Every character is accounted for, every cinematic is accounted for in this presentation, which means this is gonna feel twice as long as the first game.
So when you freak out, that’s normal. That’s part of this. This is about an hour and a half to 2 hours. So hopefully you got your pee break. Okay, so we open on 15 year old Ellie. This is a few weeks after the events of the first game.
There’s a doorway leading down to this basement, and Ellie sees Tommy, he just finished climbing out of this basement, and he’s hurt bad and he’s rambling about something – needing to go after these people. Ellie’s trying to ask him, “What happened? Where’s Joel?”
And he doesn’t make any sense to her, she starts to go downstairs… Tommy grabs her hand and tries to stop her, but he’s too weak. She rips her arm away. And she heads down. And with each step, her heart races faster and faster as she sees this trail of blood.
She opens the door, revealing… Joel’s mutilated body. And then shock sets in and screams, and tries to grab his body, and Dina comes and rips her away, and in that cacophony of sounds… silence. Oh, we’re just getting started. I’ve been working on this game since we finished…
Well, really been thinking about it since we finished The Last of Us. Kurt Margenau: So many people were like, “Last of Us I is so perfect… it should never have a sequel. They shouldn’t make a sequel.” Anthony Newman: They’re like, “Oh, it wrapped up super great.”
But I think, actually, if you look at the ending… Ellie: Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true. Anthony Newman: …Ellie is accepting a lie. Joel: I swear. Ellie: Okay. Ashley Johnson: She has a very good bullshit detector. She knows something doesn’t feel right,
But I think is too scared at that point to ask. Anthony Newman: How long can you really live with accepting a lie like that? Neil Druckmann: The Last of Us feels like an origin story for a survivor in this post-apocalyptic world. Seeing how Ellie has become such a strong, unique character,
It really felt like, if we were to do a sequel, it’d be a shame for it not to focus on her. Ellie: Move the fuck out of the way. Joel: Once we’re done with this whole thing, I’m gonna teach you how to play guitar. Yeah, I reckon you’d really like that.
Whaddya say, huh? Neil Druckmann: Joel is gonna teach Ellie to play a guitar. That always felt like this unanswered promise that was lingering at the end of the first game. We did this thing called One Night Live, where we had the actors come on stage and reenact certain scenes.
Annie Wersching: Say we get you to the Fireflies, what happens next? Ashley Johnson: Marlene, she said that they have their own little quarantine zone. And that doctors are still trying to find a cure. Neil Druckmann: I wrote this new scene that takes place after the ending of The Last of Us,
But it was only shown to people in the audience. We cut off the stream right before we showed them this scene. Troy Baker: If I ever were to lose you I’d surely lose myself Try and sometimes you’ll succeed To make this man of me … Our future days Days of you and me
She’s yours. Ashley Johnson: No no no, I don’t know the first thing about this. Troy Baker: Hey, I promised that I’d teach you how to play. Neil Druckmann: That scene ends with Ellie holding the guitar and playing one note.
That image was so strong, in my mind, that it trickled into this idea of this trailer. So we started working on some concept art, kept fleshing out the story. As it felt like it was gaining momentum, Uncharted 4 needed all hands on deck. Emilia Schatz: Naughty Dog had always made one game.
And as soon as it finishes one game, works on another. When I started on Uncharted 3, we were starting to experiment, then, with trying to do 2 teams. After we finished Uncharted 3, I jumped on to Uncharted 4. At some point in time, Uncharted 4 was coming down to the wire,
And we had to shift resources, and pretty much everyone ended up on Uncharted trying to finish it up. Neil Druckmann: So I said, “Okay, before I come on in full force on Uncharted 4, I just wanna capture this trailer.” Ashley Johnson: I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
And I’ll fear no evil because I’m blind to it all. Still, I walk beside the still waters and they restore my soul. But I can’t walk on the path of the right because I’m wrong. Neil Druckmann: During the entire production of Uncharted 4, that’s all I could think about.
I had a lot of investment in Uncharted 4, but the day we were done with it, went right back to that trailer to wrap it up. Anything for this shot that’s still happening? Man: Not animation. Ellie: …of the shadow of death.
Neil Druckmann: This one feels kinda strong to me. Drawing a lot of attention. Can we tone that down? Woman: Yep. Neil Druckmann: Actually, my biggest fear with this announcement is that it leaks early. More than anything, I have nightmares about this trailer leaking early before we get to PSX.
If we’re gonna surprise people, PSX – the PlayStation Experience – hasn’t set itself up yet as a place where big titles get revealed. That’s E3. We’re revealing the Uncharted single player content at the opening of the show.
No one’s gonna expect a second Naughty Dog title to be revealed in the same press conference. Man: Please welcome to the stage: Shawn Layden. Shawn Layden: There’s one more special unveil we have for you tonight. Please enjoy. Neil Druckmann: When we first revealed The Last of Us, the Naughty Dog logo came up
And the crowd erupted, and it was such a high… that that’s been like chasing the dragon, wanting to recapture that feeling. [people exclaim and cheer] Neil Druckmann: Playing it at this surprising moment… I’m hoping it will have a similar feel. Joel: What’re you doin’, kiddo?
Neil Druckmann: People outside of the studio have such an attachment to the first game, and I’ve definitely seen fears about not wanting to make a sequel, because somehow if it’s bad, it will tarnish your feeling about the first game. Ellie: I’m gonna find… and I’m gonna kill… every last one of them.
Neil Druckmann: We’re doubling down on those fears and not calling it, “The Last of Us: some subtitle”… it’s “The Last of Us Part II” to say it’s all one story. The concept for the sequel had to feel compelling enough, have enough weight that it felt like this is an experience worth creating,
Worth spending the next 3 years on. I became really intrigued with the idea of the cycle of violence, and how… certain events would trigger acts of violence, that then would beget more violence. It’s almost never satisfying. It never brings the person you love back.
And despite you thinking it’s gonna bring some closure, it doesn’t. We just need more empathy. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could create an experience that lets you safely explore those feelings? With that theme, all of a sudden everything fell into place, and this outline emerged.
The whole catalyst for what starts the second game is Joel killing the doctor. Nurse: No! Neil Druckmann: And that feeds right back into that idea of the cycle of violence. That sets up this whole sequence of events. We’re gonna start the game where you’re playing a new character,
And that sequence ends with this character killing Joel. We really have to paint her as this monster. Then when you play the next chunk of the game and you’re Ellie, and you’re gonna “pursue justice,” quote-unquote, you’re gonna go kill this entire crew.
We’re gonna go back in time and show you that same sequence of events. This character you show as a monster, to now get you to see things from her perspective. And how this crew is a bunch of people trying to survive in this world,
And their reasons for pursuing and finding Joel, and killing him. The story was becoming very epic, ambitious… and I had a few parts that I was kinda stuck on. And I felt like, to shake things up, I wanted to bring in another writer.
Halley Gross: I thought it was a very thoughtful story about violence and obsession. He had Abby, this girl who was the daughter of the doctor… and that Ellie would go on this vengeance quest. And when he was like, “Then Ellie actually kills Abby,” I was like, “What?! You’re gonna…”
“Yeah, let’s fucking do it!” Neil Druckmann: Not only is she contributing in a lot of ways, she’s challenging what the story can be. She’s wanted to add more romantic intimacy between the characters. Those are areas I’ve been… more uncomfortable writing that stuff.
After the first day, she was telling me she went home and told her husband that… “I think I just got Ellie’s girlfriend pregnant.” ‘Cause that was her big idea the first day, and that had this trickle-down effect that actually added a lot to the story. Halley Gross: Ellie is this very relatable character.
I thought she was a perfect vehicle to challenge this notion… that violence doesn’t have a cost, because it does in reality. It’s going to ruin this girl. Y’know, people love Joel and Ellie, and we’re about to kill one and make the other one a villain.
Neil Druckmann: I was very nervous telling Troy we’re going to kill off Joel. In the first game, he was advocating that Joel should die. Troy Baker: When I read the ending to Part I, I was like… “You’re gonna piss a lot of people off.” Marlene: Let me go.
Ashley Johnson: Marlene is the closest thing to a parent Ellie has had, outside of Joel. Joel: You’d just come after her. Ashley Johnson: A lot of people got hurt, and Marlene would be one of those people. Neil Druckmann: Joel has crossed these moral lines, and therefore he deserved to die.
He thought it might be a more dramatic ending, and I was like, “Nah, you’re crazy.” But then in the second game, that’s why I thought he would take it pretty easily. Troy Baker: He goes, “So… Joel dies.” He’s like, “So this happens, then…” and I had to stop him like,
“Can you give me just a second?” Because it literally was as if someone was telling me about how my friend had just died. Neil Druckmann: I think he took it hard. It was like… the character meant so much to him.
We’re gonna kill off this character, his role is gonna be much smaller on this one. Troy Baker: All of a sudden it was… “Please don’t take this from me yet.” Ashley Johnson: Ellie is scared to be alone. Everybody she’s loved up until that point… she’s lost them.
Joe Pettinati: It’s hard to imagine the story without Joel dying. You feel that hate, Ellie feels that hate. You’re 1-to-1. You’re on the stick. And that informs the rest of the story. Tommy: This way, c’mon! Joel: You okay? Abby: Yeah.
Neil Druckmann: We get you – through interactivity – to really connect and empathise with this character. Joel: Y’all act like you’ve heard of us or something. Neil Druckmann: And then make you feel like, “I’ve led Joel to a trap.” Anthony Newman: When we started out making The Last of Us Part II,
Neil actually wanted to be very ambitious about changing the game almost entirely. In the first 4 or 5 months, it was actually an open world inspired by Bloodborne. And it was purely melee focused, it was all hand-to-hand combat. Emilia Schatz: It wasn’t just the melee combat, we were also looking at layout structure.
Bloodborne had a very open space that kept getting bigger and bigger as you explored. I really like that feeling you get of mastery over the world. It starts to become almost a character in the game itself. And so, that was also something we were looking at.
Anthony Newman: We started out making it as different as humanly possible from the first game as we could. And then dialing it back. The open world thing didn’t work with the story we were trying to tell. Emilia Schatz: In pre-production. we spent a lot of time just doing setups.
Self-contained units that tried to expound on a single idea. Trying to start out with simple shapes and building up to more complex shapes. Starting out with 1 or 2 mechanics, and building up to those mechanics. Izzy Fiacco: Even in our experiments, we try to add as much context as we can.
We establish a goal we’re gonna be going for, we establish beats, so there’s an emotional journey, stakes are raised. Figuring out some traversal stuff, a lot of climbing, and balance beams, and… seeing how far we can push that direction without it getting over-the-top, like Uncharted. Emilia Schatz: More verticality.
More use of that grass, and stealth. Arnaldo Licea: My name is Arnaldo Licea. Man: What do you do here? Arnaldo Licea: I do design. Man: How long have you been doing it? Arnaldo Licea: A day! I got an opportunity to work in QA, and that was a great learning experience.
I shipped The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. Patrick Goss: The thing I’m proudest of is the people who came into a quality assurance job… as a contractor, which is entry level work, and used that job to get to where they ultimately wanted to be.
Arnaldo Licea: When I interviewed for the QA position, I specifically said that my goal was to be a designer. Patrick Goss: He had formed this relationship with design where they knew they could rely on him. Spending his free time designing a demo, and at the same time,
Him going to them, and not being like, “Here’s 50 bugs you need to fix.” He went to them and was like, “What do you need?” “How do I help you? What kind of bugs do you need?” For their part, they embraced him and were like,
“Why don’t we show you how to lay out navmesh?” Arnaldo Licea: I am anxious to prove myself. There’s no “babying” when you start, it’s just hit the ground running. If I don’t cut it I go back to QA or find something else.
We’re trying to figure out at the moment how we handle big spaces. Bigger than the first game. Izzy Fiacco: The enemies are too spread out to be considered one single, small encounter. And seeing what behaviours we need to start developing for them to make it look good.
Neil Druckmann: The opening of Seattle, that whole section was pretty slow. And quite linear in the level design. Let’s assume that there’s guys in this building. Someone’s starting to shoot at me from the second floor. So okay, if I’m on the horse…
If I’m getting shot at, I can’t take cover on the horse. Probably first thing I’m gonna do is jump off. And that’s slow and clumsy. Maybe we could make that faster. But once I jump off, I wanna take cover behind something.
I’m thinking, “I’m taking cover, now what the fuck do I do with this horse?” I assume the enemies are gonna shoot at it. If they don’t, that’s kinda weird. Does Dina ride off with the horse to help it stay safe? Well, that sucks ’cause I’m trying to build a relationship with Dina.
If my partner leaves me, that makes me like her less. Okay, Dina HAS to get off the horse and take cover with me and help me engage with enemies. Okay, but the horse is still there. What happens with this horse? Does it ride off on its own in order to protect itself?
And it comes back after… or that feels too intelligent for a horse? That seems a little funny. As soon as there’s ranged combat, the horse makes it fall apart. What if we make this whole sequence on foot? How do I approach this building? Imagine this is more dense, with cars…
And ferns, and interesting ways for me to close this distance. Maybe when I get close enough, 2 militia guys come out. I have this little fire-fight with this front, before I can rush forward and go into this building, climb up, and take out the sharpshooter that was harassing me. Really simple, small fight.
Now there’s tension. Guys could come from anywhere! From this rooftop, from these windows. And that really inspired us to take some pretty drastic changes as far as the flow, inserting more combat, opening up the layout to give the player more options for how they explore the city.
You can imagine this as being the hub, with it poking into streets, and I could go into those streets and explore, and find those locations, what we’re calling “dungeons.” So that’s the plan. Some of these changes are big, but it got us excited.
This feels like a true evolution of T1 as far as going more systemic and giving you options. Kurt Margenau: If there’s concern, it’s about scale, scope, can we actually build this thing? Rob Krekel: The scope is always bigger than the last game. It always has been. It always will be, probably.
But this scope on this game is something pretty extraordinary. Kurt Margenau: Everyone seems to agree the thing we’re building is gonna be cool once it’s done, it’s just that it’s such a big game. Anthony Newman: Our games have become more and more ambitious, and the studio has gotten a lot bigger.
Neil Druckmann: When I started, we were 40 people. Now we’re over 300. You can’t handle that many people with a flat hierarchy. As we grew, we’ve had to introduce new titles just to control management, control communication, make sure things don’t fall through the cracks. Anthony Newman: We have no producers at Naughty Dog.
Neil Druckmann: There’s so many talented people here that you can rely on and lean on. It makes the game better. And that’s really the secret sauce of Naughty Dog, is how collaborative it is. Rob Krekel: You find the right people who really wanna do the best they can possibly do,
And you give them the resources to try. You’re getting what you asked for – is a creative person, right? You’re getting the freedom to go as far as you can go. But sometimes, I think, we need to be saved from ourselves a little bit.
Joe Pettinati: With The Last of Us II, there’s a real sense of opportunity. This is going to be a much cleaner production than we’ve done in the past. We’re gonna get it right this time. Neil Druckmann: This is the first project that’s had the proper pre-production period,
Where we have locked down – for the most part – the story, beginning, middle, and end, before we started production. That hasn’t happened… I don’t know if that has ever happened. Now that I think about it. Emilia Schatz: It’s a very, very messy process.
Which is, a lot of times, why it’s really difficult to schedule. I think right now, we are planning on springtime of 2018. So when springtime of 2018 comes around, and The Last of Us II isn’t in stores,
You can look back at this and say, “Well, I guess their plan wasn’t exactly set in stone.” Anthony Newman: Historically, we’ve done very poorly at being efficient without the pressure of an external deadline. Neil Druckmann: Every time we have some showing of our games, it’s gonna be seen publicly,
It’s gotta be one of the best-looking, -playing things in the industry. For example, the first trailer was coming online, and that forced us to define the look of our game, define the location of where the game takes place, define Ellie’s look, and her age, and her hair, and her outfit.
We were forced to make those choices. We can’t just keep iterating, because there’s a deadline. Joe Pettinati: We want to try and schedule the game using these milestones as soon as possible… Emilia Schatz: …which means we gotta keep the marketing rolling.
Which means, next E3 6 months away, we need to look at a gameplay demo. Anthony Newman: E3. It’s always been the biggest and most extravagant showing of the game industry. There’s something special about the energy of E3. Emilia Schatz: We need to figure out the gameplay, ’cause right now
We’ve just got a bunch of cool prototypes and stuff, so it’s scary. But we work well under pressure. Anthony Newman: We were hoping to be really aggressive and show at E3 2017, just to really kick the project into gear as fast as humanly possible.
Neil Druckmann: We wanna break it up into a roughly 2-minute cinematic. A flashback sequence that will set the emotional context for… what will then go into a 5-minute gameplay sequence. We wanna do this festival within Jackson. There’ll be a live band, and we’re seeing people lively, having fun.
Man: For the crowd, are you thinking 30+ people? Neil Druckmann: Frank says we could do with 30 variations. I think we could make that work with 30. Dina pulls Ellie onto the dance floor. Ellie’s dancing with her, making all these guys jealous, and then Dina says, “You wanna make them REALLY jealous?”
And she leans over and kisses her, and on that we do a hard cut to Ellie in the middle of the woods. So we shouldn’t see any buildings, just woods, ankle-deep water rushing underneath her. Man: What about rain? Are we still doing rain?
Neil Druckmann: I haven’t discussed it with the other guys, but… Christian Gyrling: That demo that we show externally for the very first time is setting the bar for… the rest of development. But the problem is, we’re also working on Uncharted 4: The Lost Legacy.
Waylon Brinck: So, E3 is June 13th. Which means we wanna be done 2 weeks before that. Which is 4 and a half months from now. Anthony Newman: With Lost Legacy shipping at around the same time of E3, there are shared resources between the 2 projects…
Emilia Schatz: …especially sound and particle effects, so they were all on Uncharted. Sandeep Shekar: When it comes to polish phase, we’re polishing this and SP DLC at the same time. I don’t know if there’s any specific item that needs to be worked on, but there’s gonna be programmer time doing both those things…
Travis McIntosh: There’s gonna be times when we’re… “This needs polishing in E3 and this needs polishing in SP DLC,” and… we’re gonna have to compromise at times, maybe. Anthony Newman: We didn’t have it at the forefront of our mind, that yeah, they’re freaking shipping a video game.
It’s literally the hardest part of making the game, is shipping it. And we were trying to ship a demo – the second hardest thing you can do – at the same time, and sharing a lot of their resources.
Neil Druckmann: One thing that would be helpful is to find out what are the items you’re most worried about. Let’s say, rain. We can do this thing without rain. So if that helps you a ton, we can make the decision now to remove rain. Eben Cook: It’d definitely help.
Frank Tzeng: How about wet hair? Man: Well, if she’s gonna be swimming, can’t get around that part. Frank Tzeng: How about no swimming? Man: Puts on a cap. Joe Pettinati: I got a real clear energy of the meeting, which was, “How do we shrink it?” It was such an impossible task.
You can’t help but start feeling some doubt, some anxiety about the leadership not understanding the logic of it. I think like anybody else here, I was ready to roll up my sleeves and figure it out. Evan Wells: Alright guys, we’re gonna try to keep this pretty short.
So after yesterday’s meeting, there were a lot of side conversations and there was a sentiment about how much work there was to get not only this done, but then to ship The Lost Legacy. It matched up with feelings we were having, so we started discussing the… responsibility of actually attempting this,
And started feeling it was a little bit irresponsible. That if we were to try to meet both deadlines, we could probably do it, but we would end up doing a lesser job on both projects, both deadlines, than we would if we were doing them individually.
Feels like they’re both important enough to give them the due attention… so, the conclusion that definitely is there is… that the demo that was discussed yesterday will not be presented at E3. Um, yeah. Frank Tzeng: Does it mean that our main point should be focusing on shipping U4? Evan Wells: The Lost Legacy?
Yeah? Definitely. We should still try to… we essentially don’t want to completely halt work on this, and, you know, all hands on deck on Lost Legacy. Neil Druckmann: It is still to finish the demo, just to give us a buffer so these 2 deadlines aren’t overlapping.
Now we have more time to work on this demo properly, without the pressure of… Joe Pettinati: Once that meeting happened, it was just like, “Right, of course.” I’m not in the Twilight Zone. It makes sense not to do this. It felt really nice seeing the leadership having the team’s back,
And seeing the logic of the situation in front of them. Evan Wells: That’s it. Man: Thanks. Okay, so… are you pissed off? Neil Druckmann: Am I pissed off? No, uh… What am I? I guess on one sense, it’s relieved.
‘Cause there was concern of whether we could hit the quality we know we need to hit for both Lost Legacy and for… what was going to be our E3 demo. Then again, it’s kinda disappointing, because… I was excited to get this demo done and get it out there,
And get the reaction, and now it’s gonna have to happen at some other point. Anthony Newman: What we’ve decided to do is deliver the demo at around the same time. But that’s gonna be purely internal, and the demo won’t be 100% shippable. Gameplay and design and animation are gonna be locked in June.
Then we back off, we finish Lost Legacy, and then resources free up to finish the particle effects, the lighting, and the sound. And then we ship just the glossiest, best-looking demo you’ve ever seen. We burn that to a disk at the beginning of January,
And then we don’t touch it again, and nobody sees it until E3. It’s going to be really interesting to see if we can really, really commit to being done 5 months, 6 months in advance of E3, and not be tempted to say, “Eh, could be a little better. Let’s go back.”
We really need to have the discipline not to do that. Neil Druckmann: But that then left us like, “Okay, what’s our next marketing beat?” “What are we gonna show next from this game?” Emilia Schatz: So now we have a new plan, where we’re going to release a cinematic around PSX time –
I think we’re going to do it at the Paris Games Show. Neil Druckmann: This seemed like a pretty intriguing scene to introduce Abby. That whole scene is gonna be our next marketing beat, and we’re not gonna say much about it – how it fits into the game or where it fits in.
Abby evolved over time. If you look at the concept art, the character looked very different than where we’ve ended up. I don’t remember at what point we decided to go with someone really muscular and broad, but I remember once the idea came up, it felt very fresh.
Ashley Swidowski: Once we nailed down the body of Abby, we played around with different ideas of how we wanted to… accentuate her arms or not. Neil Druckmann: There’s something interesting in Abby feeling a lot like Joel. Laura Bailey: When I got cast, Neil was joking around and he was like,
“You should probably beef up in order to play her,” and I’m like, “Haha, yeah it’s mocap, whatever.” And he goes, “No, really, you should probably beef up to play her.” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right, I should totally start deadlifting as much as possible.”
So I did, and I was training like crazy, and then I got pregnant. Eh, what’re you gonna do. Neil Druckmann: We need to separate her from Ellie. It shouldn’t feel like I’m playing a reskinned Ellie. Abby should – in many ways, – look, behave, fight differently.
So in gameplay, we’ve discussed she needs to have different upgrade trees. It means we have to make the investment of capturing a whole different moveset for Abby, we can’t just remap Ellie’s animation onto Abby. Abby has a fear of height, and there’s stuff we’re doing with the camera to make you feel vertigo.
That helps build empathy, it makes this character real. Abby: We let you both live… and you wasted it! Ashley Swidowski: She’s, aesthetically, a very intriguing and iconic and powerful character. Mel: Abby, who are these kids? Abby: They saved my life. Can you take a look at her?
Neil Druckmann: Once she killed Joel, what is Abby’s motivation? What is she trying to achieve? Her redemption is really taking care of Yara and Lev – these 2 kids who are from a warring faction. Halley Gross: She has been taught to hate them, an inherent xenophobic reaction to them.
It’s about saying, “Can you come to love your enemy?” Abby: Scars built all this? Lev: Seraphites. Abby: Yeah, I was gonna say that… Ashley Swidowski: These are kids that grew up in a very different context as Ellie, and how they live their lives and experience the world is totally different.
Halley Gross: I’m getting really attached to Lev. He’s been able to keep his head up, despite losing so much himself… in a world that is so harsh. Lev: We’re taking too long. Abby: Can’t move any faster. It won’t do your sister any good if we’re both dead.
Halley Gross: I really like his dynamic with Abby. Her having this… fuckin’ brassy little sidekick who calls her on her shit in a way that nobody else can. Lev: What’s going on between you and your friend Owen? Abby: Oh my god, Lev! Now? Lev: It seemed really awkward! Abby: Just go!
Halley Gross: …Who understands the sense of being orphaned, in the way that a lot of people can’t. Abby: How long have you two been on the run for? Lev: Two days. Abby: What the hell did you do? Lev: I shaved my head.
Abby: They want to kill a little boy because he shaved his head? Halley Gross: I am not trans, so it’s a very delicate thing to tell… a story of an experience that I have not had. And that’s something we wanna take seriously. Lev: Did you hear what they called me? Abby: Yeah.
Lev: Do you want to ask me about it? Abby: Do you want me to ask you about it? Lev: No. Abby: Okay. Halley Gross: It’s really about trying to create a multifaceted character… who is trans, and that absolutely is an important part of who he is,
But also a PART of who he is, not the whole of who he is. Neil Druckmann: As far as the Paris cutscene, pretty stressed out. We have 13 days, less than 2 weeks, to finish this thing, and there are still some big ticket items.
Lost Legacy turned out to be a much bigger project than we originally envisioned. But now that it’s done, everyone is now on board. Anthony Newman: We’ve got the greenlight demo done. Jesse: She’s uh… putting on quite the show. Neil Druckmann: It’s very real. We’re in full production now, I guess that’s…
The short of it, we’re in full production now. Man: Hey everybody, PlayStation’s live at Paris Games Week 2017. We’ve got a huge show for you, starting now. Jim Ryan: Well, what a great way to open Paris Games Week. Let’s have the first in-depth look at a much anticipated and exclusive title.
Marlon: Last of Us II! Last of Us II, please! Please be Last of Us II. Anthony Newman: Our fans, they wanna know every last thing about what’s gonna be in this game. O.C. Deidre: Is this The Last of Us?
Anthony Newman: Neil has taken the way he creates an arc – this sense of drama, this sense of mystery, or this dramatic tension – and, crazily, has brought it to marketing. Neil Druckmann: I view marketing as part of the game.
It’s very calculated what we put out there, and how we want you to connect different marketing assets. When we first released the teaser trailer, too many people right off the bat said Joel is dead. Halley Gross: The blown-out light really… fucked us in a way I don’t think any of us saw coming.
Neil Druckmann: We actually underestimated our audience a little bit. They’re so sophisticated now, so you have to get MORE sophisticated, like, “How am I still gonna surprise players and viewers?” Anthony Newman: You start on characters you’ve never seen before, in a world that could be The Last of Us, could be anything.
That creates a really cool sense of tension. Neil Druckmann: At no point are we gonna market that you play as this other character… Marlon: What is this? Yo, that looks good though. Laura Bailey: I was so excited about working on it, and I couldn’t say anything! It was so rough!
O.C. Deidre: Oh, is she gonna cut a baby out of her belly?! Neil Druckmann: In Uncharted 4, you find a comic book that shows Ellie’s mom, pregnant. So people already had theories that The Last of Us Part II was gonna have Ellie’s mom.
Oh, if we just black out the letters, she has the same number of letters as “Anna,” Ellie’s mom’s name… We’ll get people to think this is Ellie’s mom. O.C. Deidre: Oh my god, girl’s got a good… That hammer’s from the outbreak poster.
Anthony Newman: So we had a poster with the forearm of a character you’ve never seen before with this wolf’s head in the background, what does that mean? Prompting this mystery… Neil Druckmann: You want people to feel like they’ve figured everything out, and then… have the story surprise them.
Marlon: Man, if this is The Last of Us II, bro… I’m’a go crazy. Oh my god, oh my god…! Last of Us II?! Yeah! O.C. Deidre: Yes, bitch! I fucking knew it! Neil Druckmann: Everything we put out there is shaping expectations. And then the final game, hopefully if we did the job right,
Should subvert those expectations in an interesting way. We knew we were pushing boundaries with that cinematic. We are making a violent game, we’re not gonna shy away from how violent it is. It is part of what we’re trying to say.
And I thought it was a great discussion, initially, about what is the appropriate level of violence. When is something so violent that it turns you off… where you just don’t wanna experience it at all? I liked that they were wrestling with those things,
I didn’t like some of the insinuations about the trailer being misogynistic… towards the female characters. Laura Bailey: I don’t think this story ever glorifies violence against women. There’s no bias towards women or men, it just so happens that the 2 protagonists of this story are female.
And therefore that’s what you’re going to see the most of. Halley Gross: There has to be failstates in video games, which means a character has to be capable of being hurt. So does that mean there can be no female protagonists in video games? Because that feels super sexist to me.
And frankly, women ARE the victims of violence, and don’t we want to see women fucking fight back once in a while? Emilia Schatz: That character, her hand getting hurt has consequences for hours of gameplay to come. Neil Druckmann: One article even asked the question, “Were any women involved in the making of this?”
And it’s like… yeah. The co-writer, the lead character designer, the lead character artist… All the actresses that worked on that scene… Halley Gross: I… I am so fucking…! Here’s what I hate about that article. I’m sorry. Do a modicum of fucking research! Just a modicum of research, just a little bit,
Before you put something out there to suggest that no woman could have worked on this because of the level of violence, because there was violence against women, because it is a video game. It’s so fucking sexist! I like watching graphic violence. Does that make me less female?
I like having a conversation about what power is. Does that make me less fucking female? I like working on a video game, I like playing video games. Does that make me less fucking female? Suck a dick! …Don’t put that in. I can’t… I can’t… Neil’s gonna say, “Put it in,” but don’t.
I also don’t represent all women, but I can represent this and say, “I fucking wrote this.” I wrote this. I literally wrote the sentence, “And then Yara eviscerates his esophagus from his throat.” I wrote that sentence. That is in the script. And I fucking stand by it.
I’m afraid of being turned into a token rather than the truth, which is we are being thoughtful about the female narrative. These characters are more than just their vaginas. If you wanna have a serious debate about feminism and feminism in video games, and female depiction of violence, then you need to…
Not see it as a binary conversation. It is an incredibly nuanced conversation, you cannot make blanket statements. And you cannot make presumptions! Fucking do your homework! I’m right here! I’m tweeting! John Sweeney: The tone of the violence in the game has always been… important to portray as realistically as possible.
Ashley Swidowski: Our job, outside of just drawing up concepts, is really pushing our reference pipeline to make sure the character artists are getting the most realistic examples of whatever they’re working on. We can’t find certain things, so we make the reference ourselves. John Sweeney: Simulating brain on wall.
How does that drip fall down? Ashley Swidowski: What does canvas looked like when it’s soaked in blood? Splashing blood on them, dripping blood on them. John Sweeney: We put down some wet mud, and pooled blood onto it to see how blood would react to a wet dirt surface.
So there’s little pieces of grass and twigs and things that’re carried through, like there’s actually movement following the edge. Ashley Swidowski: One of the animators got a piece of lamb and we stuck it in Yara’s shirt sleeve and hit it with a hammer… Eric Baldwin: Here we go. Yeah, we have a break.
She’s gonna need to hold this as straight, ’cause if she does this it’s gonna… just the weight of it’s gonna wanna make it fold. So, I’m trying to keep it as straight as possible. John Sweeney: This past week’s shoot was specific for the infected eating people’s jugulars,
And there was a concept that was done with blood running down the mouth, but would that happen? Let’s find out. I got on the ground and pretended to eat away at a bloody, soaked rag that we made. It produced some pretty surprising results. Most of my face got covered in blood.
Ashley Swidowski: Look up a little, John. Teeth. People here will go to that length of trying to make sure things feel as real as possible. Yeah, we do a lot of crazy stuff here. Nobody gets hurt, but… It’s really hard to see these characters that you spend so much time with,
And, for lack of a better word, birthing into existence… tortured and abused… Neil Druckmann: We’re shooting the Joel death scene, which is like the catalyst of the opening of the game. This scene has all of Abby’s crew. It’s a complicated scene, because it’s the most actors we’ve ever had in a single shot.
Man: Y’all act like you’ve heard of us or something. Woman: It’s ’cause they have. Fuck, he’s out. Troy Baker: Or… or, Joel doesn’t die. Woman: Minor line change. Troy Baker: So then what happens is all of us become friends… Knowing what was going to happen and knowing how it was going to happen…
I got very fearful. Neil Druckmann: There’s so much weight to this scene. This scene has to be right, it’s really difficult to re-shoot if we need to. In the first game, having to call Troy and Hana back to re-shoot Sarah’s death was very, very, very difficult for me.
Troy Baker: The last time I tried to do a big, emotional scene… Don’t do this! Please, don’t do this! Don’t do this! Please, god, no! …That didn’t go too well. And we had to re-shoot it. Don’t do this to me, baby. C’mon…
How the hell am I gonna play this? Like, how are we gonna do this? I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I have the… the chops. Am I gonna put Laura through this? Because I know how hard it’s gonna be on her. Woman: Take 1. Marks.
Neil Druckmann: Action. Laura Bailey: Joel Miller… Troy Baker: Who are you? Laura Bailey: Guess. Troy Baker: Why don’t you get out whatever speech you rehearsed and get this over with? Laura Bailey: You don’t get to rush this. Neil Druckmann: At the end, I really loved what he brought to it.
Ashley Johnson: I couldn’t wait to get back into Ellie’s shoes again, because it’s where… weirdly, I feel most comfortable in a lot of ways. Because it feels like a character that feels the most like me that I’ve ever played. Which is a little disturbing. I mean, minus the murder and the killing.
Neil Druckmann: So it’s a bit of a step forward, like you’re about to lunge and shoot. Ashley Johnson: Okay. Sweet. Neil Druckmann: The biggest change that has happened since initial pitch is Ellie is there when Joel is killed. It used to be she came across the body,
And then she had to rely on Tommy’s testimony of what happened. And we shifted it, which made it much more dramatic and intense for her. It puts more of it on-screen, and allows you to better understand why she needs to pursue these people.
Troy Baker: The hardest part for me… was looking over at Ashley. Ashley Johnson: No! Knowing that Troy was not gonna be a part of it as much was really hard. Knowing that Joel was not gonna be in Ellie’s life anymore, it was just… it was hard.
So much of that day feels like a blur ’cause there were so many feelings involved in it. Troy Baker: What I had to do, I felt was very, very little. There’s one reaction, then beyond that we’re on Ashley. There was no acting, there was pure, raw emotion.
I’m staring in the face of it. Ashley Johnson: Joel! Why are you doing this?! Get the fuck off me! I’d lost a little bit of my voice. I couldn’t scream as loud as I wanted to to get that frustration and sadness out. Laura Bailey: Ashley was behind, crying and…
Knowing Abby was taking this away from her was very difficult. And so, I was crying while we were filming that scene. Yeah, it was very emotional. You want what I want, right? Patrick Fugit: End it. Now. Ashley Johnson: Wait, please stop! No! Joel, Joel! No…
Neil Druckmann: We want him to die in this really unforgiving sort of way – it needs to feel senseless for you to say, “Fuck these people, I’m gonna pursue them to the end of the earth and make them pay.” Ashley Johnson: I’ll fucking kill you…
Neil Druckmann: If the scene doesn’t work with what we captured on the stage, almost nothing we do in post is gonna make it work. Joe will take a pass at the scene, and I’ll give high level notes. Joe Pettinati: But he’s doing it without animated cameras, without character models, without environment.
So it’s a bit of a guessing game to see if this will work. Neil Druckmann: I like the concept. I… felt like there was a lot of repetition, and it felt long. Once Joel’s head gets smashed, I don’t want a closeup look of him. Matt Neapolitan: Okay.
Neil Druckmann: What if we could do the smash from the back of his head? Matt Neapolitan: Yeah… Neil Druckmann: So it’d be a black shape and you see a silhouette change, and blood starts pouring out, but I don’t focus on it, I don’t see the details.
When the club comes down and she’s screaming, I feel like we could take all their audio out. And music can take over. We’re trying to build more rage than sadness to really set up our journey. Matt Neapolitan: Okay. Neil Druckmann: I’ll come back, and there’ll be another version of the scene. Okay, play.
Ellie: Joel, fucking get up. Please stop! Please don’t do this… Joel, please get up! Nooo! Neil Druckmann: Overall, it’s fucking awesome. I got emotional at the part where he gets killed, it feels so fucking tense. Joe Pettinati: There certainly is still a ton to do.
We still have like… 45 scenes that haven’t even been looked at yet. It’s terrifying given our deadline. The process right now is just getting Neil. We need to get Neil into the room. Sam Prince: Which one are we showing first? We’ve got essentially 3 versions.
The one that I did – and this would work with what we’re talking about doing with this scene. And then… Joe Pettinati: Ah! Close one. Matt Neapolitan: I would probably say… Joe Pettinati: There are people standing here! Matt Neapolitan: This, yours, Mel, or Mel’s, yours, this. Man: I got bad news.
Joe Pettinati: He’s cancelling?! Man: He’s cancelled. Joe Pettinati: But we have the cameras set! He’s supposed to come in, he’s the highlight… Man: Actually, it’s good we’re getting this on camera. Matt Neapolitan: This is what it’s not about! Joe Pettinati: This is what it’s about.
Man: Yeah, he has some melee stuff to review today, and he said let’s pick up tomorrow. Joe Pettinati: So yeah, that’s what happens. So it’s like, “Okay… Alright. That’s fine, I don’t care.” Yeah. Arnaldo Licea: I get called up to Neil’s office one day… and there’s an empty seat.
And Neil goes, “Sit down.” I’m like, “Oh my god, I did something wrong.” He’s like, “Do you know why you’re here?” And I’m like… “No, are we gonna talk about one of my levels?” And he laughs and goes, “No, you’re gonna work on the E3 demo.”
It’s always been a dream of mine, working on an E3 demo, seeing it on stage… Is this a joke? Am I getting pranked right now? Man: So speaking of E3 demos, remember way back when when you guys said you were going to lock that content and not touch it? How’d that go?
Anthony Newman: Well… And then we ship just the glossiest, best-looking demo you’ve ever seen. We burn that to a disk at the beginning of January, and then we don’t touch it again, and nobody sees it until E3. Well, I think we knew at the time… that we weren’t going to NOT touch it.
It’s going to be really interesting to see if we can really, really commit to being done… and not be tempted to say, “Eh, could be a little better. Let’s go back.” The game’s been making progress for 10 months since we locked that demo down.
A lot of advancements have been made, a lot of new ideas, new mechanics. We really need to have the discipline not to do that. Honestly, it feels like we are addicted to being late. Neil Druckmann: Okay, we’re starting. I don’t know exactly what we’re gonna do today, other than…
Come up with a really long list. We’re gonna try to limit it to an hour, so… we’ll be done at 4, no matter where we’re at. Looking at the cinematics first. Because we did it so early and had a rough version of it a year in advance, we got a bit complacent.
Jesse: She’s uh… putting on quite the show. [laughter] Neil Druckmann: Sure is. Where are we on getting physics on these strands? Man: We’re working on it. Neil Druckmann: So for next time? Man: Yes. Neil Druckmann: We didn’t scramble to figure out what it is we’re going to show,
And we had the structure of the festival, going into this fight in the woods in Seattle. But it was harder to build the momentum we usually have, and I think that panic wakes everybody up… and felt like it took a bit longer to get there this time.
Daniel Harrison: So then you’re going as if to kill this guy, see somebody over there. Breaks… 30% of the time. But use your imagination. Man: Go in a bit slower to give some time. The animation is breaking the melee system. Daniel Harrison: Okay.
Anthony Newman: I’m confident in the demo if we finish it. I’ll be frank, it’s not looking great. Neil Druckmann: Okay, this is totally broken. For next week, let’s make sure it’s all there so we could actually review it. Okay, thanks everyone. Anthony Newman: I feel like this demo is cursed.
Arnaldo Licea: The E3 demo was a version of our original greenlight demo. But I had to make it fully playable and shippable. The first thing I did was basically take that space, made by another level designer, and put enemies in it and start fighting.
But when I started playing it, I remember it just wasn’t there. That parking structure was way smaller, so it felt more cramped. I remember going to Neil’s office and being like… “How much can I change this?” And he’s like, “Well, what are you thinking?”
I’m like, “I’m thinking this big thing…” and just brand new design, I’m just throwing it out, everything – I wanna do this, I wanna do that, I wanna make sure that it feels like a sandbox, that it feels like this big space,
Multiple paths, like something we haven’t really done before in The Last of Us. And he just goes, “Go for it. Let’s do it.” John Sweeney: We picked a location in Seattle that is probably the hardest lighting scenario… we would have to pull off in the game.
I wanted to get the overcast look nailed, ’cause so much of the game’s dependent on that. How do we pull off this look? Can we pull off this look? Neil Druckmann: Everything felt a little muted, we were losing that next gen quality of our engine.
For a second, we actually turned the sun on in the demo. But we lost the mood of that overcast, blue look. John Sweeney: That moment was really rough for me. Just felt like years of my life that potentially would’ve just been wasted on this.. this pipe dream of a look.
Man: Well we were struggling with… like, last summer, it was a fine balancing act. John Sweeney: Is this whole thing just gonna crumble? Is the whole direction now gonna have to change for the game? Not just this demo. Have I steered this company wrong?
Neil Druckmann: Took some really big iterations and tried some crazy ideas ’til we came up with a hack. John Sweeney: Talked with the programmers and found a few settings that actually gave us exactly what we wanted. It was really one thing. Neil Druckmann: We faked the sunlight within this ambient look.
We could get some directionality on the lighting. John Sweeney: But it was like, if we do this one thing, it got us the look we wanted. So I’m glad that happened. Artem Kovalovs: For this game, there was a major push to make a new volumetric fog system.
It’s not just an overlay on top of the screen, that’s why it’s called “volumetric.” You feel the volume of it. Fog’s gonna be a little bit thicker near the ground, right, because you’ll see grass getting through it. Fog also allows you to see the light. Fog adds atmosphere, atmosphere brings everything together.
Now with this game, we did add recently some new tech that… allows us to make some of the water drips more dynamic, meaning if you have a car, you will see water follow the glass, follow the hood, and then from the bumper you’re gonna start seeing dynamic droplets.
So that was really cool, and then we can now also use this technology to drive blood. Now we can have blood dripping, and we have water dripping. The water trail can pick up where it is bloody, and it can change its own colour, and start dripping more red.
And on top of it, we also clear out blood. So you will see bloody area, you will see water trails going down, and you will see the water trails washing out the blood, picking up the redness and going down. Really, really cool.
Kurt Margenau: In the E3 demo, we do wanna show our next gen animation system. Jeremy Yates: One of the biggest animation upgrades we wanted to add to this project was motion matching. The way that it works is it takes a pool of animation data,
And it picks the most appropriate clip to blend together and create very fluid and organic movement. We want these characters to feel grounded and believable in the world, properly shifting their weight and moving the way a real human would.
In order to capture all of those on the stage, we use something called a dance card. A choreographed set of patterns that the actor can move on the floor. Anthony Newman: Basically, that’s creating this bank of little pieces of animation.
The motion matching system pulls from that bank all the animations necessary to have them move perfectly, in any arbitrary way. When it works, it’s so far-and-away better than any other animation technique. It’s like a quantum leap of the highest order, in terms of quality.
Neil Druckmann: Any one mechanic is not maybe anything you haven’t seen before, it’s the combination of how it all comes together, the way it works with the animations system… Anthony Newman: The new stuff we’re talking about is like, you can be in grass…
One of the biggest things we do in the demo is jump a gap. It’s tough to be like, “Oh crap, you can jump?!” It’s like… But it’s new to OUR game. Kurt Margenau: We have to have the best prone mechanic of all time.
No one’s ever seen when I aim in prone, and she rolls up on her back and aims like this. It can never clip through geometry. Being able to rotate 360, in all directions. It can never do a janky thing when she’s reloading while doing it, or aiming.
In water, there’s an IK thing that will lift her chest and head up, and then if it gets too deep, now we’re in a special prone underwater moveset thing. Her chest and arms and everything are matching ground plane. Things that a player will never notice. And it’s because we purposely did it.
There’s no such thing as, “Oh you know, it’s not as good as this other game’s one, but it’s fine.” No, it’s fuckin’ Naughty Dog, we have to have the best version of the thing, whatever that is. Anthony Newman: E3 overall was amazing. The press conference was in a very different venue –
Usually they have them in these big auditoriums, and this was almost like a pop-up. Kurt Margenau: It was more like a theme park idea, but in a parking lot in a tent in Los Angeles in downtown. They built a whole, crazy church thing… which was pretty rad.
Neil Druckmann: It was super cool, it was better than we expected. You could feel the tension of people trying to figure out, “What is this press conference?” “What’s going on? What game are they gonna show here?” On the Naughty Dog logo, you get this big cheer.
On the Ellie reveal, you get this big cheer. Every moment that we’ve constructed and planned meticulously for… really a year now, hit. And hit the way we wanted it to hit. Dina: Maybe they’re jealous of you. Ellie: I’m… just a girl. Not a threat. Dina: I think they should be terrified of you.
Ellie: Fucker… Anthony Newman: One of the biggest reactions was when the HUD came on. They looked at that forest and thought, “There’s no way it can look this good, that’s impossible.” But when we flashed the HUD, it’s like, “Yeah, that’s it. This is the real game.”
People are not ready for this. This is gonna fuck you up. Dina: See? I told you. They should be terrified. Anthony Newman: It was electric. My skin was tingling the whole time. Kurt Margenau: As soon as it’s done playing, I’m on my phone.
Arnaldo Licea: It was wild to see it just everywhere – see it on YouTube, see people commenting on it. It was a really special moment. I shipped something as a level designer. Kurt Margenau: There was such a reaction to the animation fidelity. “Holy crap, this is the best-looking animation I’ve ever seen,
Are you kidding me?” Joe Pettinati: We’re on the forums, going through the messages, seeing how much people think it’s amazing. Someone’s like, sort of cynically, that our stuff was fake. Neil Druckmann: I guess it’s a compliment to the animation team, for someone to say it’s fake when they’re working so hard.
Right away I responded like, “Don’t respond, don’t do anything.” It’s just not professional. Joe Pettinati: I was a little anxious about it ’cause… it’s a LITTLE fake. You know? Kurt Margenau: “Fake” is an interesting word. There’s an argument that he’s right. Neil Druckmann: It’s not the final, polished game.
You can’t play this demo in any way, you have to play it in this very specific way. But before we even showed the demo, it was like, “Let’s not put anything in there we feel like we can’t do.”
Kurt Margenau: There was no thing of like, “We don’t know how we’re gonna do that.” It was just we don’t have it systemic yet. Like systemically, a guy pulling you out from underneath a car… We didn’t have that hooked up yet. Ellie: Motherfucker!
Kurt Margenau: Now we have it hooked up in the game… Scar Male D: It’s her! Neil Druckmann: Ultimately, as we’re building the rest of the game, if anything feels like it’s not the right call for the game, we don’t mind changing it.
We had certain things in the demo for the first Last of Us, where Joel picks up a pistol and takes out the individual bullets from it and then pockets it. And we could’ve done that, it just took too long. So for gameplay purposes, we cut that out.
Joe Pettinati: I was talking to other animators, and they were like, “Yeah man, they think it’s fake. They have no idea. It’s awesome.” Anthony Newman: The same animators who made this demo are gonna make the final game, so I dunno what you’re talking about. Joe Pettinati: They were confident, which I’m glad.
Jeremy Yates: We knew what we were doing and how special it was. It was a little bit of a microphone drop to the industry. For many it was inspirational, and they were excited to… be able to add some of those details to their future games.
And for some of them, it absolutely freaked them out. To see that this might be the new bar that’s expected for other games that follow. Kurt Margenau: Part of me is like, “Oh shit, they’re fuckin’ calling us out.” It’s like, we have to deliver this.
We always were gonna, but people have called us out… so we HAVE to do a full-body throw animation when you pick up a bottle and you’re running, and not just a partial animation. Because that guy fuckin’ called us out.
Anthony Newman: The real challenge is making the whole game look as good as this one controlled situation. Neil Druckmann: We come out of E3, and hopefully we’ve set the standard for this is what the rest of the game needs to feel like.
Kurt Margenau: When you already know exactly what you’re supposed to do in a game, memorised everything… it’s hard to have a true experience with it. We have to bring in people from the outside to play it fresh. Emilia Schatz: We try to start playtesting as early as possible.
We’ve got testers in bright and early, they’re gonna start playing the game. They’re actually just right across the hall over here. Patrick Goss: It is a fire drill. Because things have to work. Pete Ellis: I’m currently watching 10 people that we have in at the moment focus testing.
I’ve got all of their screens up so I can watch… all of them at the same time, generally to keep track of any kind of recurring patterns or how long people generally take in certain areas. Patrick Goss: They do things we haven’t thought of. And it really shows us where our holes are,
Like, “Hm, maybe I should change this, maybe I should try that.” Michael Barclay: This player’s pretty lost, trying to figure out this puzzle here and they’re trying to jump on a truck. He’s got a really awesome solution here where he’s putting… this plank on a dumpster and moving the dumpster around.
We’ll probably have to go in there and try to fix some of that stuff up, but we’d rather figure that out now than in 6 months. Pete Ellis: So things like puzzles like this one – although they’re figuring out the puzzle, they’re actually not doing it in the order that I’d like.
What would be better is if they came into the space and realised, “Okay, that’s the thing I need to be climbing up to or getting to.” Then they can kind of work backwards from there and go,
“Well if I need to get there, how do I get up? Oh, I can get up from this thing.” It’s quite heartbreaking when you see people who are really confused or don’t get it, and it’s something you think should be obvious, but it’s not at all. But it’s good data.
Neil Druckmann: We’ve had a few people on the team that have been really passionate about… making our games even more accessible for people with different kinds of disabilities and making sure as many people as possible can experience our game. Emilia Schatz: Accessibility’s something that really touches a lot of people.
As we get older, pretty much all of us are going to have some sort of accessibility need. Matthew Gallant: It’s important to welcome people with disabilities into all of our public spaces, into our shared culture, and video games are a rich part of that.
Paul Lane: I love this, that you don’t have to have a 2 button feature to keep her crouched down. This is awesome, I love that. Emilia Schatz: Brandon Cole, he said, “I heard you announced this game… What’s the possibility of someone like myself being able to play it?” And Brandon is blind.
I hadn’t really thought about that before. I don’t even know if it’s even possible, but I wanna try ’cause that sounds interesting. If you click on the L3 button, it turns the screen and character towards your… the next objective. You’re able to instantly flip.
Matthew Gallant: It was very much inspired by the talk you gave last time you were here. Brandon Cole: I figured. That’s a beautiful thing. Matthew Gallant: We had this feature that let you navigate along the golden path, and we also had this other feature, you could put out this sonar pulse
And you’d hear where all the items and enemies are located. But Brandon was playing that, and was like, “This navigation feature is great, but I don’t wanna just follow the golden path… I wanna navigate to other things.” It occurred to us, “We can combine these 2 features.”
We can let you scan for items, and then navigate to that item. Brandon Cole: This gives you more room if you do it this way, for different types of sounds for different types of items. You know what I’m saying? Different sounds for parts, explosives, keys… Matthew Gallant: Craftables and collectibles…
Brandon Cole: Yes. Exactly. But since we wanna hunt for secrets just like anyone else, we’re also gonna wanna know, “Hey there’s SOMETHING way over there.” Matthew Gallant: Players with disabilities still want to have challenge. Emilia Schatz: It’s not about just making an easy mode. Matthew Gallant: What happened there was an auto-vault.
So you pressed into a wall and it automatically vaulted. Brandon Cole: I feel happy about this. Matthew Gallant: This is an example of the good part of the studio culture which is self-empowered, that I think allowed us to do this crazy thing,
This thing that I couldn’t tell you if it makes business sense to some degree, but it was something we were passionate about and interested in. There was a way we saw we could make the game better, it was something we saw we could push the frontiers of and we went with it.
Studio leadership was supportive of us, but it really was a bottom-up kind of initiative. Emilia Schatz: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that early success really helped to build momentum for the rest of the project. Neil Druckmann: Shielding everybody from the costs and the budget of these decisions helps them focus on their discipline.
Don’t worry about money, worry about making the best game possible. Trust that there are people at the top that are looking at the budget, and considering that. Anthony Newman: At a certain point in the project, we start offering dinners to the team.
And it’s an acknowledgement of, “Okay there’s a lot of hard work to get done” … when we know people are probably gonna want to be staying late. Now we are crunching. This is crunch.
Neil Druckmann: I must’ve felt it for months, that this release date is not realistic with how big the game is. People were asking us, “Is this a real date?” because it’s not feeling like a real date anymore. So we felt like we had to react pretty soon.
Then at some point it just felt like because people were starting to put in longer hours… it wouldn’t have been fair to not figure this stuff out sooner than later. Kurt Margenau: (sighs) Are we ever gonna finish this game?
Neil Druckmann: If you work hard for longer, that could have a toll on you. We told everybody, pace yourselves. It’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. We settled on a February release date. We’ll leave some gas in the tank. Anthony Newman: Right now, we are dancing a very intricate and dangerous dance.
We have something like 6 months left to finish the game. And we are also showing a demo to the press. The longest playable demo we’ve ever done – 2 separate levels of the game. A level towards the beginning of the game where you play… with Dina on patrol outside of Jackson.
And then the second part of the demo is in a level that’s super duper challenging – Ellie by herself, murder mode. So what we’re doing for the press in 9 weeks is… really those 2 levels of the game. It’s unlikely we’ll need to touch them again ’til the game ships.
That was really the only kind of demo we could do at this point that would still help further our production goals as well as give us this marketing boost that we need. Neil Druckmann: The more we talked about it the more we convinced ourselves,
“This would actually be a good time to put out a trailer.” Kurt Margenau: Building these 2 major demos and a trailer next to… the rest of the fucking game…? Phew. Neil Druckmann: That felt impossible early on. The thing that’s always hard for us is the polish.
You review these things and we’re looking at all these tiny details. Even that shot of Jackson, it’s like, where should the trees be? How much fog should there be? How much sun? How should the sun hit the clouds? How do we get all these civilians?
The kids, do they have the proper gear? Are they wearing the right clothes? Is the tractor leaving tracks on the ground? That kind of crazy detail can only come through all these departments coming together and rising to this occasion to achieve that level of quality.
We wanted to show the team the final trailer. Before we show you the trailer, just to say thank you to everyone… where we jumped from doing a 3-hour demo to this trailer where we had almost nothing. It’s pretty amazing what we can do when we all come together.
In fact, it’s so amazing you can forget. I’ve been here for a long time and I can forget. So to remind you, maybe reignite some of that panic, we’re gonna show you 2 trailers. One from exactly a month ago, and one from about an hour ago when we wrapped up the trailer.
So, enjoy. Jesse: Look who decided to join us. Alright. You all know the drill. Ellie: Dina! Where are you! Joel: You think I’d let you do this on your own? Jeremy Yates: That only gets one clap. Neil Druckmann: Keep in mind, this is what the whole game’s gonna look like.
We’re gonna make it this awesome. Ellie: You can’t stop this. Neil Druckmann: This was a good reminder, look, when we come together, when we rise to the occasion, when we do this thing that people outside the studio talk about, like, this Naughty Dog magic, this is what it looks like.
So when you look at parts of the game that aren’t there yet, know that we can get there in a pretty short period of time when we’re so focused. Ryan Chan: The date was the scariest part about that. [laughter] Evan Wells: We got the trailer done.
Just wanted to take this moment to run through the events of Outbreak Week, which is when the trailer’s going to debut. We are going to be having the big press event in Koreatown, at this giant warehouse. We’re actually having 80 journalists from all over the world come.
We gotta make sure we have very comfortable chairs for 3 hours. Halley Gross: Outbreak Day is the day the outbreak happened in the United States in 2013. Anthony Newman: In real life, we celebrate September 26 as Last of Us Day. Neil Druckmann: Every September 26th, we’ve done something for Last of Us fans.
Kurt Margenau: When people play these 2 sections which are very different, I hope and I feel that both of them are equally impressive. When you play that first demo, you’re like, “That was incredible.” Ellie: Oh my god. Kurt Margenau: This could’ve been the whole demo, this could’ve been the whole thing.
It says enough about what the game is. Then you play the other half and it’s way more mechanics-heavy, way more combat-heavy. Militia Female C: Keep going, boy. Ellie: There. Kurt Margenau: In the highest level of how Naughty Dog is perceived as a company, it’s that we’re story first and mechanics second.
A lot of it is, I think, proving to the press and the people that yes, we can do both. Neil Druckmann: I want people to walk right in and say, “This is the best-controlling… this is the best-feeling 3rd person shooter.”
Kurt Margenau: It’s on the level of the best action-stealth games you’ve ever played. Ellie: Just shut up. Anthony Newman: One of the things that I’ve always found really exciting about The Last of Us is the fidelity at which we represent human intelligence.
Jeremy Yates: One of the ways that really helped make them feel more human and more alive was the way that they used their body language to communicate to each other. Militia Male D: Everybody spread out! We may have multiples!
Jeremy Yates: We had a number of sessions where the animation team, design team, and programmers all got together and we acted out a number of scenarios. And what that does is it gives us really great reference, and touchpoints that we can always look back to about the way we naturally behave,
The way we naturally respond to each other. Those are the types of details we want to weave back into the game. WLF Soldier: Someone took out Zoe! Who the fuck’s out there?! Sweep the whole goddamn street. Halley Gross: Our NPCs are named so that you understand these people have relationships.
Kurt Margenau: They wanna get revenge on you. It’s this little… little mini-loop of the whole premise of the game. WLF Soldier: Omar! Flank her! Kurt Margenau: I just killed their friend and they wanna kill me now. WLF Soldier: Omar!
Halley Gross: There’s a cost. You kill that person, his friend now feels a loss. His dog is now alone. [dog whines] Anthony Newman: Dogs are really difficult, to start off with, because they’re quadrupeds. They don’t turn around, they kind of wheel around a little bit. WLF Soldier: Smell something, girl?
Jeremy Yates: The main concern we had is… how is it that we can actually get a dog to perform a dance card on the motion capture set? When we finally brought them on set, it was just incredible what these dogs are capable of doing
And what the trainers were able to accomplish in a short time. Woman: Jump, jump! Good boy! There you go. Anthony Newman: They move extremely quickly, so they’re super hard to shoot. They are very low to the ground. You have these attacks that are designed to go up here,
And then you have to do them down there. Neil Druckmann: Killing a dog has gotten people more upset than anything else in the game – than hanging people, than eviscerating people. Kurt Margenau: We’re gonna break new ground in dog murder. Halley Gross: We had a new scripter start 2 months ago.
First question when she walks into the middle of the room, “I have one question – does the dog survive?” And everyone’s like, “Oh, no. First day…” Kurt Margenau: We killed it, and then you have to love it knowing it’s already dead. There’s probably gonna be people upset about that.
Mel: Hey, Al. You wanna go to the trucks? Let’s go to the trucks. Anthony Newman: With the notable exception of Alice, we took great pains to ensure that every combat encounter that you fight against a dog you do not have to kill any of them.
It’s more palatable to kill people because they’re all there… because they choose to be there, but all of these dogs were trained to do this exact thing. So you’re killing an innocent creature. WLF Soldier: The fuck’s that? Fuck, fuck! Ellie: Got you.
Anthony Newman: That feeling of discomfort is exactly what we’re trying to explore with The Last of Us. Ironically, making them more realistic… makes people feel more okay about killing them. We had kind of a goofy art prototype, we had just a very rough dog.
We found that goofy dog that had no fur, people felt really bad about killing it. When you would shoot them, they would fall over dead and give one last whine as their dying breath, so… We tried to really tone down the pitiability of all the dogs.
Rob Krekel: The best sound in most games are the stuff you don’t notice. The foley in the game is extremely detailed. [sheep bleating] Rob Krekel: Things like foley are very easy to get wrong and noticed for the wrong reason. Very difficult to get right,
But when you get it right, no one’s gonna pat you on the back for it. Audio guys are a different breed – we listen to everything all the time. It’s kind of a curse. Our ability to use pre-recorded assets from a library that’s commercially available… has been diminished almost entirely.
Because we have very specific needs. Man: [screeching] Rob Krekel: We’re trying to take what we did in the first game and bring it to another level of detail. Beau Jimenez: Yeah, play with that a little bit. Mixing that tonality is cool. Yeah. Man: Okay. Rob Krekel: The enemies themselves, especially the infected,
Have had to go through a review process. In the first game, they’re pretty coarse. They’re basically on or off. They’re either walking around mumbling… or they’re freaking out, trying to get you. So now we’ve developed this murmuration/breath system that… allows them to have a much more natural flow between being agitated and not.
A big part of those recording sessions is… working with the voice actors, it’s much more collaborative. Man: [vocalising] Beau Jimenez: Yeah, that’s cool. I kinda wanna see what your more natural voice sounds like. Rob Krekel: You’re basically trying to coach people that they’re not zombies. Beau Jimenez: Now imagine sprinting.
Man: I’m already out of breath. Beau Jimenez: Yeah, take your time, man. That’s really great. Rob Krekel: One of the folks that we worked with… the sounds he was able to generate from himself… was unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. Gnarly-sounding roars and breaths and wheezes and…
Really interesting stuff that I’ve never heard come out of a person ever. Sound is inherently post-production on a lot of this stuff. We just have to be jamming. We have to be as prepared as possible, and that’s what we try to do. A lot of stuff is yet to come for us.
Which means there’s not a lot of time left. Which means it’s gonna get really intense. It gets intense for everybody, but for audio in particular… we’ll be here late. Emilia Schatz: I think that… I don’t know if it’s the whole studio, but I know I’m definitely feeling… very tired right now.
I’m feeling a little burned out. I’m realising that I can’t crunch like I used to. I can’t put everything I have into… these games as much as I was able to when I first got here. It’s pretty unanimous that this game is really big. Or, it’s bigger than we’d like it to be.
Joe Pettinati: The Last of Us Part I is small compared to this game. My argument: make the game small again. I don’t even call them small. Halley Gross: There were times when I was writing 40 pages of in-game dialogue a night. Neil kept saying, “Stop, you have to give it to somebody else,
We’ll hire somebody, we will make this work.” And I was foolishly like, “I can handle it, I’m tough.” I would like somebody to teach me how to have work-life balance. Rob Krekel: There are some times where I wish I had…
Somebody in production or a big brother that could be like, “No, go home.” “This is already great, you don’t need to do the next thing.” Joe Pettinati: I feel like at any given point, you go into the kitchen and you’ll find people… what I would say, “salon-ing” about the game.
Like, going deep philosophy into what’s working, what isn’t. People criticising this or that – “This doesn’t look good. I don’t like this scene.” “This doesn’t work for me. I hate this.” Neil Druckmann: They’re going to lunch and expressing doubt to each other, like,
“Is this gonna come together? Is this the one that screws Naughty Dog up?” Let me just exude whatever confidence I have left to try to bestow this person with it, so they can feel inspired and go off and do their work. But then sometimes you’re alone in the office, and you’re like…
“What if this DOESN’T come together? What if this is the one that sucks?” “What if this is the one that sinks Naughty Dog?” So then you have to bury it, compartmentalise it. Who knows what damage it does to your body while you’re doing that. Because ultimately…
You can’t let that fear dictate how you work. And just… keep the faith. Emilia Schatz: The game was just about done, was content-complete… We were fixing bugs when… Neil Druckmann: There’s these rumblings of this pandemic happening. Kurt Margenau: I remember when COVID hit, and we were like… “Bro, really? For real pandemic?”
Neil Druckmann: At first it feels like, “Oh, this is nothing we need to worry about.” And then all of a sudden you DO have to worry about it. Kurt Margenau: Are people gonna want to play a game that takes place in a pandemic when there’s a real pandemic?
Anthony Newman: We had never worked from home. Ever. Naughty Dog was strictly against working from home. Arnaldo Licea: We did not have the infrastructure set up at this studio to work from home. Anthony Newman: Because we were so intense about security and leaks…
That all of our data, including our emails and chats and IMs, it all had to be on a server inside the building. We were airgapped from the outside world. Neil Druckmann: The operations team, the IT team, our engineering team,
They all had to coordinate in a very short period of time to get us working from home. We don’t even know when the game can come out. Kurt Margenau: Sony was like, “We don’t know if we can physically ship this product… with the supply chain and stuff.”
Neil Druckmann: We had to come out and say, “The game can’t come out in this state, and we don’t even know when it will come out.” It’s delayed indefinitely. So a lot of our most hardcore fans are angry with us. Around the same exact time, we started having these leaks.
We’re like, “We didn’t put out this video.” Where is this coming from? It’s a video from one of our reviews, so you could hear the notes… and people that can’t attend the meeting can watch it after the fact. We store all these videos on our server.
Did it come from the inside? Someone within Naughty Dog? Matthew Gallant: My first thought was, “This isn’t a developer leaking this, is it? This isn’t someone on the team.” Neil Druckmann: It’s this person in this Netherlands, downloaded terabytes of videos through a backdoor in the server.
And then this is where we made a fatal error. Let’s close this backdoor. Then this person put out everything. A video goes up on YouTube – and I don’t remember what the first video was – but it was something relatively benign. Anthony Newman: They weren’t super important scenes, they were little clips.
It was like, “Okay, that’s a little weird. What is that?” Kurt Margenau: All out of order and stuff. And I was like, “Oh… oh, that’s bad.” Halley Gross: And you just wanted to say, “Stop, wait! Don’t watch it!” You’re going to ruin things for yourself.
Kurt Margenau: There’s Youtubers I’ve watched for years and they’re making entire videos and the title is like, “Fuck Naughty Dog” and “Fuck The Last of Us Part II.” Neil Druckmann: There’s just all this negativity and no positivity, because no one has played the game.
They just have these videos out of context and all these rumors mixed with them. Abby is playable… Kurt Margenau: They thought Abby was trans ’cause she has muscles. Neil Druckmann: Here’s the ending if they kill Ellie. Kurt Margenau: Then it turned into a whole political thing –
“Oh, Naughty Dog’s doing all this political shit.” Neil Druckmann: And then I get this text from Evan: “They just posted Joel’s death.” And my heart sinks. I can’t even describe this feeling, it’s just dread. It’s almost like you just heard someone you care about died. That’s the closest I could come to.
I thought Troy would be looking at that and be like, “You see? You were wrong.” Troy Baker: He said, “Do you think we did the right thing?” And I said, “I don’t know, Neil. I haven’t played the game yet.” I was livid. I was real angry.
Neil Druckmann: I’m bombarded with hundreds of negative comments. Death threats, antisemitic comments… It’s putting me in a deep depression. Halley Gross: There’s some stupid stuff like, “You’re a feminazi, you’re…” whatever shit like that, but some stuff was really… disturbing. Ashley Johnson: The hatred I think that was behind it… I was sad.
There were a lot of days where I would just cry. Laura Bailey: Every time I went online, that’s all I saw. Just death threats and threats of violence, and… The worst of it, the really hardcore death threats, got passed along, and they made sure that they weren’t anyone that lived close by. Um…
Yeah, they were threatening my son. You know, who was born during all of it. Yeah, it was rough. It was rough. But, you know… More than anything, it just kind of… it taught me to keep a distance. You know? Halley Gross: This thing that I spent 4 and a half years on…
It’s getting violated. Kurt Margenau: And then for 2 months before release, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t release the game sooner, ’cause it’s not done yet. Neil Druckmann: …And that was the lowest point in my life. I’m working on the game… towards the end, at home, by myself, feeling very alone…
And I said, “Who am I doing this for?” Like, why am I… This is too much. And I barely squeaked by. Then we were able to finish it. We sent it to reviewers, and… reviews are through the roof. I called Troy and I said, “Dude, I’m sorry. I feel like I failed you.”
He’s like, “What are you talking about?” And I’m like, “You know how some people are talking about…” He’s like, “Oh dude, I don’t care. I played the game… and I love it!” And I got really emotional. I realised how much I care about Troy caring about the game.
That was a huge sense of relief. Troy Baker: There’s not a single aspect of the game, Part II, that I would change. Any time someone comes up to me and says, “You know, I didn’t really like what they did to Joel,”
I was like, “Great. Awesome. Tell me a better version of the story.” And to this day, they still can’t. Neil Druckmann: It was a traumatic experience for myself and many people on the team, and… the kind of hate we got because of those leaks will stay with me forever.
I can’t even describe how angry I was. Of what the damage this person did to us. I want them punished in every sort of way. I wanted this to be the… this villain. This person is in their 20’s or whatever, they live with their parents. And it’s a fan.
Then when we delayed the game indefinitely, this is what they said, like, “I wanted to force Naughty Dog’s hand. I wanted to force them to release the game. So I thought if I put out all the videos, eventually they’ll put out the game.” Which, again, was never an option for us.
I remember sitting there, sitting in my anger, and then slowing down and going, “Okay, if anybody should take the lesson from The Last of Us Part II, it should probably be us.” Just let it go. Eddie Vedder: Back when I was feeling broken I focused on a prayer I believe
And I believe ’cause I can see Our future days Days of you and me Neil Druckmann: We got Eddie Vedder to play “Future Days” for the Game Awards. I’m a huge Pearl Jam fan. Yeah, I know. Shocking to many people. Eddie Vedder: What a fascinating way to tell a story.
It’s just getting better and better all the time, and… I really appreciate the way that “Future Days” was used. Especially bringing Joel and Ellie together… connecting through music. It was cool to be part of it, so thanks for having me and enjoy the rest of the show. Neil Druckmann: How lucky am I?
How cool is this, this person that I’ve admired since I was a kid, is now mentioning this game that we all made? And then we start winning award after award after award. I wanted that validation for the team. Everyone at Naughty Dog,
I can’t wait to hug and high five and get drunk with each one of you. That’s gonna have to wait ’til next year. More than anything, I speak for the whole team when I say this, we’d like to thank our friends and family that stood by us
And supported us throughout us making this game. You inspire us not only to make better, more meaningful games, but to improve how we make games. Emilia Schatz: The pandemic brought up the question of health and mental health – are we developers that are gonna stay at the studio and… have full careers?
How do we make this sustainable? Anthony Newman: I chuckle, in retrospect, just how… absurd the failure of trying to alleviate crunch was. If you have great processes, and you’re super organised, that doesn’t fix crunch. What that does is it allows you to make a bigger game.
Patrick Goss: We read the post mortem feedback for The Last of Us II, and it was really, really… upsetting to see what coworkers had gone through. We were highly motivated to try to figure out how to fix it. Kurt Margenau: Everything about our workflows were already being upended with remote work and everything,
So it was like, yeah, we gotta do this now. Jeremy Yates: We knew that to make the real changes we did, it would take the entire studio working together. Neil Druckmann: We now have the goal for Naughty Dog to eliminate crunch.
Anthony Newman: The only thing that fixes crunch is deciding you’re not going to crunch. Patrick Goss: When we onboard people, we tell them… we have a reputation as a studio for crunching, and it’s something we don’t want. And it’s something we’re not going to do anymore.
Neil Druckmann: First we had to do, “What is crunch?” Let’s define it. Because when you just look at hours, they turn out to be too simplistic. Kurt Margenau: It’s a multitude of factors, it’s not just one thing. It’s not just, “Oh, because of this, this is what’s causing crunch.”
It’s so many of these little things. Neil Druckmann: How do we make sure no one at Naughty Dog burns out? Patrick Goss: Every couple of months, we send out a 90-second questionnaire that goes, “Are you worried about your workload?” “Are you worried about having to work overtime?”
If you feel like, “I’m overburdened with work,” you have to tell somebody. We used to, as a studio, when we were getting close to shipping a game, bring in dinners for the whole studio. We don’t do crunch dinners anymore.
Emilia Schatz: Being able to work from home is hugely helpful for me, for my mental health. You know, my daughter’s there, my wife is there. Anthony Newman: Hybrid is really the sweet spot, because I think the benefits have been… enormous.
Neil Druckmann: In the past, our leads, our managers, were the people that were best at their craft. But not necessarily the best managers. So we created the role of “principal.” We gave people the choice of, “Do you wanna make stuff, or do you wanna lead and manage?”
Patrick Goss: Arnaldo is now a lead designer here. Arnaldo Licea: Now I’m responsible for a team, and I really enjoy that, and… being able to share that knowledge and work with someone, even if they’re more experienced than me, and it’s been great so far.
Anthony Newman: We have a very large and robust production department now, that we didn’t have. Matthew Gallant: Holding us accountable when we make a decision, when it’s just everyone going, “Yes, more. Yes, better. Yes, polish.” Tallying that up and going, “Okay, well this is the result.”
“Now you’re not in your ship date anymore.” Anthony Newman: It feels so much like a different studio. Arnaldo Licea: I hope that we can keep changing for the better. And make sure we’re making the games that we wanna make, that we’re really passionate about, that we don’t stop doing that.
Matthew Gallant: We want self-driven, healthy designers. We wanna have it all, we wanna have both. Can we do that? That’ll be the question I guess. Neil Druckmann: The HBO thing has been… a wild ride. Anthony Newman: I just wanted it to be good. Like, if it comes out and it’s a good show…
That’s gonna be huge. Laura Bailey: I’m sure it will be very different when I actually see Abby being portrayed. That will be so weird– I can’t imagine what Ashley and Troy must be feeling. Ashley Johnson: Specifically because Ellie is a part of my heart, in some ways it was really hard.
I feel like Bella was the only person who could play her. Because I feel like she IS Ellie, there’s a part of me that’s… weirdly protective of her. Troy Baker: I remember when Neil told me, “We found Joel.” I was like, “He wasn’t missing.” He goes, “Pedro Pascal.”
And I went, “Ah… we’re bulletproof.” Halley Gross: It felt like Craig and Neil together saw this was a story about humanity, and they made it a story about humanity. Troy Baker: We got Frank. Who knew that was waiting? Craig’s screaming from the sidelines going, “I did!”
Ashley Johnson: When Neil and Craig asked me to play Ellie’s mother, Anna… it made me so happy. And I’m crying so it doesn’t seem like it, but… it was symbolic in so many ways to me. Being able to bring Ellie into the world, be the first one to fight for her…
It breaks my heart. Neil Druckmann: It felt like, on the other side, we could get this story to people that will never play a video game. Halley Gross: My mom is watching the show, and she can enjoy this story, and she can be a part of it.
She’s so excited I’m working on season 2 and getting to see that. Neil Druckmann: I love this idea… that someone can watch the show, and then realise, “Wait, that’s based on a video game?” and come back and check out the game, and realise there’s all these rich games – AAA, indie,
All sorts of stories that are really unique to this medium. I did some other interview where someone asked me… about The Last of Us, and would there be any more stories or something. I mentioned we have written a story that takes place after Last of Us II that stars Tommy.
I hope one day we get to make it. The headlines across the industry were like, “Naughty Dog has outlined The Last of Us Part III.” And that’s actually wrong. It was always a small story, it was never a full title. At the time, we had higher priorities at Naughty Dog,
To fix our pipeline, to fix work-life balance issues. Just based on where we were, I didn’t wanna prioritise this story, so that story was shelved. I still believe one day it will see the light of day. I don’t know if it’ll be a game or a show… TBD.
The first game had such a clean concept of… the unconditional love a parent feels for their child. The second one, once we landed on this idea of… the pursuit of justice at any cost, justice for the ones you love, it felt like there’s a clean concept here
And there’s a through-line from the first game about love. If we never get to do it again, this is a fine ending point. The last bite of the apple, the story’s done. The great thing about working at Naughty Dog is that we don’t have to.
It’s always like, we would love another Last of Us, but if you guys are passionate about something else, we’ll support this other thing. Very privileged position to be in. I never take that for granted. I’ve been thinking about, “Is there a concept there?”
And for now years, I haven’t been able to find that concept. But recently that’s changed. I don’t have a story, but I do have that concept, that, to me, is as exciting as I, as exciting as II, is its own thing, yet has this through-line for all 3. So it does feel like…
There’s probably one more chapter to this story.
30 Comments
THIS GAME WAS SUCH A GARBAGE RUINED BY LGBTQ PROPAGANDA
It was the best game for me (south korean fan)
Hearing that they planned to kill Abby originally, and that they said they were making Ellie the “villain” of part 2, just sucks man. They don’t understand the character at all or what people like about her. So many strange decisions. Really good documentary though.
One of the best games ever made!
As much as I absolutely loved the 1st game, I still feel like the 2nd game's story could have been told in a better way. Don't get me wrong I still think the 2nd was awesome, but the story severely lacks proper pacing. Like the major beats are out of sync and could have been reworked. It could have made me actually appreciate abby, and feel sorry for her. But instead I really didn't care at all.
The realtime in game facial animation doesn't look nearly as good in the final game, if it was already in the demo why not have that level of fidelity in the full game? Honestly it's the only real disappointment I have about the final game because to me the demo facial animations were like the most impressive part about it and they really got me hyped.
TLOU2 is still the GOAT for me, I'm yet to play a game that has had this much of an emotional impact. Flawless from start to end.
As a fan, yes, of course Joel's death really pissed me off at first glance but as the story continued it began making so much sense. Of course, it's not perfect and it have could change a litlle bit like some plot holes or some decisions, but we're humans! Neil and the whole team are humans! And still, they managed their way to make one of the best, complete and most heartful games I've ever played. Just like it happened at the end of the first game, if the story is over I'm just happy for now. Really proud of what ND has done, great team!🙌
You will never get more hate than you got for TLOU Part II but it is my personal favorite from the two games so I would definitely be hyped for a Part III
0:00 That ceiling is so uncomfortable. Why they don't cover all the ventilations with ceiling panels lol?
They tried to hard an made TLOU2 too much. LOU1 was so incredible. A masterpiece. Unfortunately the sequel missed the mark. It was a great game but doesn’t match its predecessor
When creating sewage gets a making video…
Absolute garbage anchored down by agenda
Was wanting to see this so for so long and it didn't dissapoint!
Kudos to all the Naughty Dog folk who made TLoU Part II exist, a game that I'll never not love and cherish 🫂
Troy: "And till this day they still can't"
You clearly asked the wrong people!! Because ANYTHING would be better than the way it happened.
Great video. The game is a gorgeous hot mess though. The developers, animators, designers, and audio team are clearly amazing first class talents, but Naughty Dog should fire the writer and demote Druckmann before doing another project.
It's just so Hard, lot's of ups and down but it's worth it – the best game I ever played
Thank you very much for this experience, you are the best!
very good game all around . but the hate was ridiculous and just dumb . ya makes you wonder about some .
I see Hideo Kojima really had a huge influence with the devs of ND, which is actually good I mean MGS is my favorite franchise
What a freaking masterpiece of a game! I thank everyone who worked on this brilliant piece of art. No game has ever made me feel like this game did. Be proud Naughty Dog. You've made one of the best games of the generation.
I love this game and its story so much. What many internet chuds didnt unterstand is that the story is about forgiveness. Abby is introduced as the antagonist and with her actions she is made to be hated by the player but just like Elli we learn during the game her motivations and see her human side. In the end we learn to forgive her, just like Elli does when she lets her go. Of course you have to fully let the story take you in, instead of going "Muuh JooOEeEeLlllLL" The entire time.
i missed gustavo santaolalla
The Last of Us II is an incredible game. Eagerly awaiting a pc port to play it again there too.
holy shit I'll be waiting for the third game
I loved the documentary, it covered so many topics that I had already imagined and that had no answer. I am very sorry for the threats and abuses that were made, when people are obsessed and fanatical about something they don't look to any means to get what they want, but that is the society we live in unfortunately. I'm interested for part 3, but a new IP would also be really good.
Joel was the Last of Us – you killed him and the story became boring AF.
The Last Of Us Part 2 is one of my favourite games of all time, glad to see that it was all worth it in the end for everyone. Can only imagine how awful the leaks and hate messages were for the whole team but I’ve recently finished the remaster & you guys really did an awesome job especially with Abby, she feels just as important to the IP as Ellie now for me & I really hope we see her again. The documentary was very interesting aswell & it’s clear how much love was put into this game
Nothing's gonna be more better than watching a 2 HOUR footage of TLOU 1 & 2! This is a masterpiece!
Please announce a new IP already. I want TLoU:P3, but you have been milking this franchise and its annoying.
WE LOVE YOU NEIL