Naughty Dog to flip coin to decide whether or not to make a Last of Us sequel

Naughty Dog to flip coin to decide whether or not to make a Last of Us sequel

On Reddit, the narrative designer of The Last of Us has said there’s a “50/50” chance of a sequel being made, which continues a proud tradition of ambiguity on the issue. At one point, a sequel was deemed a remote possibility, with no chance of the lead characters of the story returning.

He told the PlayStation blog:

As far as the journey Joel and Ellie goes on it ends with this game. We were very conscious that we didn’t want to leave this story dangling. If we never do a sequel we’re okay with it, because we told the story we needed to tell.

But later, speaking to Kotaku, he had a change of heart, with the return of our favorite girl-and-surrogate-father combo no longer out of the question.

As far as whether we come back to Joel and Ellie or not, or whether we come back to the world or not, that’s all up in the air. I can tell you there are people in the studio that would love to come back to these characters.

Then, a few weeks ago, talking to EuroGamer, a sequel was on the table:

To be honest, some of them are sequel ideas, and some of them are brand new IP…. It’s kind of like how we approached Left Behind. Can we tell people a story that’s really worth telling, and that’s not repeating itself?

So it sounds like they’ve been thinking long and hard about another The Last of Us. This is not unexpected. It was an expensive, successful game, and expensive, successful games tend to get sequels. A sequel might undermine the impact of the original ending. But Druckmann continues to promise that they won’t do it simply to cash in, but only if they can think up a story worth telling.