The Last of Us’ Neil Druckmann has said making sequels to Naughty Dog‘s beloved franchises requires a level of confidence that, believe it or not, he claims he doesn’t have.
Speaking during the DICE summit last week with fellow game developer Cory Barlog, the Last of Us’ director was asked: “How do you and your teams approach character development over multiple games?”
Barlog said he had “way too much of the Charlie Day crazy conspiracy board” method of planning, referring to that Pepe Silvia scene from Always Sunny in Philadelphia which has become a bit of a meme. But Druckmann, meanwhile, said he had a different approach, as he “never [thinks] about multiple games”.
“The game in front of us is so all consuming,” Druckmann explained (thanks IGN). “I think you’re jinxing yourself if you’re starting to think about the sequel when you’re working on the first game. So when I was making The Last of Us 2, yeah, sure. Every once in a while an idea pops in your head of where it might go if we get the chance to do another one. But I just approach it as, ‘what if I never get to do another one?’ …I’m not saving some idea for the future. If there’s a cool idea, I’m doing my best to get it into here.”
Druckmann said that, when a sequel to a game does come around, it’s only then that he looks back on what the studio has already done, to decide where story points and characters can go. “And if I feel like the answer is, they can’t go anywhere, then I go, ‘I think we’ll just kill them off’,” he said.
“I’m half joking, but we just find the next game,” Druckmann continued. “When we made Uncharted 1, we had no idea we would do the train sequence of Uncharted 2, or where Nathan Drake would be. We figured it out when we made Uncharted 2. And eventually, [it was] the same when we worked on Uncharted 3, [and the] same when we worked on Uncharted 4, where we look back and say: ‘How do we not repeat ourselves? Where else could this character go? What else could get him back into the adventure?’
“And we have to come up with a new answer. And if we don’t have a new answer then we should ask ourselves, is this the right character? Is this the right game for us to work on? Or is it time to find something new?”
Barlog, meanwhile, said he found connecting elements in games today with something he worked on a decade or so ago “magical”, although noted this has its own stresses.
“It is absolutely, unequivocally the most unhealthy thing ever, because it is insanely stressful to try to fold and connect each of these pieces,” Barlog shared. “Because, give or take five years, there’s hundreds of people involved, and then a whole new group of people often are moved in on the next project. That’s a bunch of different… perspectives, and likes and dislikes that are going to negatively impact you setting something up that early. And they’re going to be like, ‘Let’s talk about this, because that was kind of the dumb. I don’t know if I want to do that.'”
“I think for me that requires a level of confidence I just don’t have,” Druckmann responded. “Like this is going to be so successful, I know where this is going next. I’m like, I just want to focus on the next five days in front of me, let alone 10 years down the line.”
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Back in 2021, Druckmann said Naughty Dog had a story outline for The Last of Us 3 penned that he hoped “one day can see the light of day”. However, at this time, nothing was in development.
Then in 2023, Druckmann reiterated that Naughty Dog is open to developing Part 3, but only if “[the team] can come up with a compelling story that has this universal message and statement about love”, as it did with Parts 1 and 2.
“With The Last of Us, it’s up to us whether we want to continue it or not… If we can’t come up with something, we have a very strong ending with Part 2 and that will be the end,” Druckmann said at the time.
At the Game Awards in December, Naughty Dog lifted the lid on its upcoming game, a sci-fi hack ‘n’ slash called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
