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Naughty Dog president and The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann says he "never" thinks about sequels for games he's in the middle of working on because he doesn't have that "level of confidence."
As reported by IGN, Druckmann and Sony Santa Monica's Cory Barlog were both speaking at the D.I.C.E. Summit last week when the question of how their respective teams approach developing characters over multiple games came up. For Druckmann, this clearly isn't something he plans ahead for, because he "never" thinks about "multiple games" at a time.
Beyond arguing that "the game in front of us is so all consuming," Druckmann believes that "you're jinxing yourself if you're starting to think about the sequel when you're working on the first game." Instead, he approaches development with the idea, "'what if I never get to do another one?'" He adds: "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."
That doesn't mean he can stop any and all sequel ideas from entering his head, of course, as he acknowledges that when he was making The Last of Us Part 2, "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." Unfortunately for anyone hoping for The Last of Us 3, he didn't elaborate here on what these ideas might have been, even if he did previously tease that "there's probably one more chapter to this story."
Barlog, on the other hand, compares his own approach to being like the meme of Charlie's Pepe Silvia conspiracy board in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the way he tries to "connect and plan with all of these pieces." As far as Druckmann is concerned, this "requires a level of confidence I just don't have."
But without any plans made in advance, what does it look like when Druckmann actually does start work on a sequel? He explains that he asks himself what unresolved elements are still left over and where the characters could go next, and quips: "I feel like the answer is, they can't go anywhere, then I go, 'I think we'll just kill them off.'" The Last of Us fans already know that well, of course.
To be clear, he's "half joking," but he reiterates the importance of the team coming up with "a new answer" that doesn't repeat what's come before. He adds: "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?"
Right now, Naughty Dog is working on something totally new in the form of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, a sci-fi adventure that looks like a far cry from the studio's previous games. It's set to launch on PS5 at some point in the future.
