The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann previously said that there is a possibility that Naughty Dog will make The Last of Us Part III but while he’s not ruling anything out, Druckmann believes that going back to the same world to create a new experience will be “exponentially harder.”
Speaking to Indie Wire (thanks, PSU), Druckmann said that he can’t give a definitive response to the question of a sequel but did say that The Last of Us‘ characters have already been established and players have seen enough of the backstory.
I’ll be a little vague and cagey as you can expect, but I think the test for whether or not to make a Part III would have to be a similar test to what we did with Part II. With the first game there were no expectations and it was like we could do anything. But now that we’ve established certain characters and themes and processes, it felt like to justify making a Part II we had to do something not that fans would just be comfortable with, but do something that would match the emotional core we found in the first game. And without that, there’d be no reason to do a Part III. Finding it with the sequel was much harder than it was with the first game, and going forward it would be exponentially harder to justify going back to that world and finding a way to vary things up. There’s already so many things you’ve seen about the backstory, about how the outbreak happens, so we’d really have to figure out how to create a new experience that matches the emotional impact of these stories and I don’t know what that is. Currently.
The Last of Us Part II is available now.
[Source: Indie Wire via PSU]