In their last two releases — Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy — Naughty Dog experimented with bigger, more explorable environments, and it appears they’re going to do the same thing in The Last of Us Part II.
During an interview with PlayStation’s official blog, Neil Druckmann, who is the co-creator and director of The Last of Us Part II, said that, like in the two aforementioned Uncharted games, the upcoming sequel to 2013’s survival-horror classic will allow players to explore much larger environments, as levels will be more open, giving players more options on how they approach navigating through and/or around enemies.
“Just as with The Last of Us, we were hitting the limits of memory, of computational power, how many enemies we could have on screen, and the size of levels,” said Druckmann. “Now we’re able to have much wider environments, sequences with a horde of infected, several squads of enemies looking for you in big spaces.”
According to Halley Gross, who co-wrote The Last of Us Part II with Druckmann, the upcoming Sony exclusive will be about 50 percent bigger than the first game, so it’ll probably take players around 30 hours to complete.
The information regarding the size of The Last of Us Part II makes it seem similar to God of War, which is also a linear single-player experience that features large, explorable environments. But, unlike in the God of War reboot, The Last of Us Part II will allow players to pass through levels and environments without killing a single enemy. So, the gameplay will offer players much more variety.
While The Last of Us Part II will be a single-player only experience at launch, Naughty Dog has said that a multiplayer mode will come later, although they didn’t give a timeline for its release. But, in a recent poll, which was published by the official Twitter account for the UK version of PlayStation Magazine, the game’s multiplayer mode will launch alongside the PlayStation 5 in the winter of 2020. As of this writing, we don’t know if it’ll be a standalone experience, or if it’ll be added as DLC for TLOU Part II.
We’re roughly four months away from the release of The Last of Us Part II, so we’ll likely get more information regarding the game and its features in the coming months.
The Last of Us Part II, which will feature Ellie as its main protagonist, is currently scheduled to be released for the PlayStation 4 on February 21, 2020.
