The Last of Us 2 Has Many Inspirations
Naughty Dog’s creative director Neil Druckmann used today’s DICE Summit 2018 to explain the inspirations for The Last of Us 2.
“There’s a show on Netflix called The End of the F***ing World, which is so well written and acted and quirky, and has been totally inspiring for some of the stuff we’re doing in [The Last of Us 2]—more on the dialog stuff,” he said. He added that Children of Men was a primary inspiration for the first game.
He also touched on another influence for The Last of Us: his own zombie game pitch for George Romero that originated when he was in grad school. The game apparently “”took ICO and combined it with characters from Sin City,” putting players in the shoes of a cop with a heart condition that protects a girl through out the game.
One of the game mechanics forced players to play as the girl when the cop experienced heart trouble. Although Romero passed on the pitch, the idea served as inspiration for The Last of Us.
But Druckmann emphasizes that these inspirations are just some of many.
”None of these games start as just one idea,” he said. “It’s a lot of ideas from different people.”
In fact, The Last of Us spawned from a Jak and Daxter reboot that ended up going in a different direction.
“We asked [company management], can we do something else? And they said yes, sure. We started talking about how we develop characters through gameplay and it grew and evolved and became The Last of Us.”
”Gameplay genre and narrative genre are not always the same,” he continued. “The Last of Us is an action shooter, but the story is about guardianship. So we tried to understand the classical structure of those genres and we looked at how we could subvert them in interesting ways.”
The Last of Us 2 will launch sometime in 2018.