This past Friday, February 21, was supposed to be the release date for the much-anticipated PlayStation exclusive The Last of Us Part II.
It was a dark day last October when the game’s director, Neil Druckmann announced via the PlayStation Blog that the long sought after sequel was being pushed back several months. What was originally going to be a winter release is now coming out at the tail end of May.
So, it stands to reason that a number of The Last of Us fans were feeling the big sad this weekend, as they looked back on what might have been.
Of course, Druckmann couldn’t resist cracking a tongue-in-cheek joke about the delayed release on Twitter.
Something’s missing today… can’t put my finger on what exactly… 🤔
— Neil Druckmann (@Neil_Druckmann) February 21, 2020
“Something’s missing today,” he tweeted out. “Can’t put my finger on what exactly.”
The tweet received nearly 20,000 likes from fans of the franchise, many of which responded. One such respondent was Ashley Johnson, the voice of Ellie and the star of The Last of Us Part II. She simply responded to her director’s tweet with a gif of Tobey Maguire crying in Spiderman 3.
https://twitter.com/TheVulcanSalute/status/1231034278806310912
Back in October, Druckmann laid out the reason for the delay.
“Let me cut to the chase and get the news out of the way,” he said. “The Last of Us Part II has a new release date of May 29, 2020. I know. It was just about a month ago when we had our big blowout for the game, letting media play over two hours of it along with debuting our new story trailer and revealing the release date. The positive response we saw from our community was overwhelming. You can feel the energy among the team members. After working on something for so many years, it’s invigorating to get a glimpse of validation for all the hard work. We realized we simply didn’t have enough time to bring the entire game up to a level of polish we would call Naughty Dog quality.”
The sequel is going to be an enhanced experience, drawing on everything that made the original game so great. According to the development team, the enemy AI has been significantly upped this time around, with enemy NPCs interacting with the environment more, and reacting to the deaths of their comrades.
There will also be some new variations of infected for Ellie to deal with. It is currently unknown if players will be controlling Ellie for the entire game or if she will be switching off with Joel.
