The Last Of Us Part 1 Was Built For “Contiguous” Play Into Part II

The Last of Us Part I was developed to create a more “contiguous” experience from the first game and The Last Of Us Part II. In a newly-released documentary, Naughty Dog’s creative director Shaun Escayg and game director Matthew Gallant provide an in-depth commentary into the remake’s development, which launched on the PS5 in September 2022. The ambition behind the remake was to create a technically-balanced experience from one game to the next, meaning players could play the games back-to-back.

“I remember the conversation in the studio being ‘wow wouldn’t it be amazing if we could play Part I and Part II back-to-back?’” Escayg said, pitching the concept as a way to allow players to “play and follow Ellie and Joel’s journey contiguously across both games, but we had this fidelity gap. The first game was made almost 10 years ago. So we sat down and we said, ‘well OK, what could we pillage from Part II, what we loved about combat and AI…”

Gallant said the starting point for the remake came during the development of the flashbacks in The Last of Us Part II. As a result, it “sparked this inspiration in the studio of just like, ‘what if we could make the whole game look like that, what if we could make The Last of Us look like these flashbacks that we kind of faked to be contiguous with The Last of Us Part II?’”

Gallant added that “it was a very appealing idea, to just have The Last of Us and make it so that if you wanted to play both games back to back, you weren’t, like, playing a PS3 game and then playing a PS5 game.”

Have you checked out The Last of Us Part I? There’s been a lot of excitement for the franchise after the hit HBO show. For more news, it was confirmed that Bella Ramsey would not be recast in The Last of Us Season 2, while Craig Mazin outlined what audiences could expect from the new season.

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