Naughty Dog has revealed the somewhat startling insight that The Last of Us 2 was originally an open-world game inspired by FromSoftware's Bloodborne before it became the very linear action-adventure game that released back in 2020.
In the new documentary titled Grounded II: Making The Last of Us Part II, co-game director Anthony Newman explained Naughty Dog's original design philosophy for the sequel that persisted through the early stages of development.
"For the first four or five months, the game was kind of an open world inspired by Bloodborne. And it was purely melee focused, like it was all hand-to-hand combat," Newman said.
"It wasn't just the melee combat; we were also looking at layout structure," added lead game designer Emilia Schatz. "Bloodborne had sort of an open space that kept getting bigger and bigger as you explored. I really like that feeling that you get of mastery over the world. It starts to become kind of almost a character in the game itself. And so that was also something we were looking at."
Of course, what we ended up getting was something fundamentally much closer to the original game: a narrative-focused, linear action game with a range of different upgradeable melee, long-range, and explosive weapons.
"We started out making it as different as humanly possible from the first game as we could, and then kind of dialing it back," explained Newman. "The open-world thing didn't work with the story we were trying to tell."
It's genuinely difficult to fathom The Last of Us 2 taking any other form than the one it has, much less an open-world Soulslike with only melee combat. What happened to Ellie's bow and arrow skills? Did the world simply run out of useable rifle ammo? Did Abby prove to the world once and for all that golf clubs are the ultimate weapon and thus guns are no longer needed? OK, that last one might've taken it a bit too far.
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