PlayStation Experience 2016 was filled with a ton of announcements, but they saved the best for last this year. A sequel to The Last of Us was confirmed today with a new trailer. Running on an updated engine, Naughty Dog unveiled the latest footage of The Last of Us Part II, confirming that both Joel and Ellie are still together and still going through the hellish landscape of post-apocalypse America. No release window was given.
Shawn Layden prefaced the reveal with the notion that the game was very early in development. Which makes sense, as Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley are presumably working on the game after just wrapping up Uncharted 4. The trailer begins with a beautiful shot of the exterior of a building that is overrun by vegetation. It then cuts to Ellie, who is definitely older and is playing the guitar and singing while over a dead body. Joel walks in and they have a discussion which ends with a very vengeful sounding Ellie, ready to kill some people.
The Last of Us is a really great character study, in my opinion, and I think that it would have been foolish to explore the world further without delving more into the relationship between Ellie and Joel after the last encounter we saw from them. It’s probably a little bit surprising that Naughty Dog revealed anything from the game today and not wait until E3 when the game was further along, but it was a hell of a way to end a conference.
Obviously stay tuned as we’ll update with more information about the game as we discover it. Let us know in the comments below if you’re excited for another chapter in The Last of Us.
Source: PlayStation Experience 2016