The Last of Us Part 2 picks back up in Jackson five years later, Naughty Dog confirms

Ellie smiles in The Last of Us Part 2.

Fans have been speculating about The Last of Us 2's location(s) ever since the game was first revealed, and now we know we'll revisit at least one very important location from the first game. We crafted a molotov cocktail full of questions and threw it directly at co-game directors Kurt Margenau and Anthony Newman at E3, and the details they provided gave us some answers we'd been hoping for long before the PlayStation E3 2018 presentation. There was a lot to digest there, so I've broken out just the part about the setting below.

Anyway! The official time and place for The Last of Us Part 2, at least for that nice scene of Ellie at the dance: five years after The Last of Us in Jackson County, Wyoming. That's where we left Joel and Ellie at the end of the first game, their cross-country journey eventually leading them a few hundred miles back to a settlement overseen by Joel's estranged brother. As you could see in the trailer, the town is doing pretty well for itself, all things considered. But nothing's perfect.

"They're still having to corner off themselves from the infected threat," Margeneau said. "The infected are still very much out there, we're still going to be interacting with them and... there's a sense of normalcy that Jackson has built for itself, because of the constant patrolling and clearing out of the infected around the area."

Still, that's just one part of the game, and just one part of the E3 trailer. It cuts from the dance scene to Ellie stalking through a woods, then a city, both of which could easily line up with the fan detective work pointing to Seattle. And if the game is anything like its predecessor, Ellie will probably do even rambling around the good old post-apocalyptic USA beyond Wyoming and Washington.

Read through our list of E3 2018 games to see what else has caught our attention from the show.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.