For those of you that missed the announcement over the weekend, Naughty Dog, the games company behind Playstation’s epic The Last of Us announced The Last of Us Part II.
During a panel at PSX 2016 Neil Druckmann, Creative Director at Naughty Dog, goes into a bit more detail about the game. Set a few years after the original, The Last of Us Part II sees us return to Ellie and Joel’s post-apocalyptic world. Ellie is now 19 years old, and as she say’s in the trailer, she’s looking to kill some folk. “If the theme of the first game was about the love between these two characters, and how we build that through story, music, interaction, and gameplay mechanics. This story is the counter of that,” comments Druckmann. “This story is about hate. And how we use all those same things to make the player feel that, through Ellie this time. The first game you play as Joel, this game you’re playing as Ellie.”
The panel also included actors Troy Baker, who voices Joel, and Ashley Johnson (you may recognise her tv drama Blindspot), who voices Ellie. The new game with utilize some high end performance capture techniques, and is rendered in much higher detail than ever before. “It was crazy because it was a full day of [pulling weird facial expressions],” comments Ashley. Troy adds “It’s weird because they ask you to do things, like… I don’t know if my face has ever done that before! It’s like ‘can you make this sounds’. I’m like, I have no idea, but we’re going to find out! But it’s crazy, because we spent hours on lip purses and stuff like that, or blinks and swallowing. And they would shoot it at 150-200 frames a second, just to get what your face looks like when you swallow… Which is crazy to think that video exists out in the world right now… and the memes begin…”
You can watch the who The Last of Us Part II trailer and panel in the video above. The game is in the “very early in development” stage, so don’t expect it very soon…
