The Last of Us Part 2: You Likely Won’t See Everything in One Playthrough
Director Neil Druckmann previously spoke to IGN about the scope of The Last of Us Part II’s world, saying “Depending where you are with the story, we might open things up significantly and say, ‘Here are some optional things you can go explore, some side stories, or you can go directly next to where you’re meant to go,’” but that a big goal for the team was not to simply pad out the experience. “It’s not padded, it has that pacing of the first game,” he told us at the time.
The latest look at the sequel also offered some more details about the upgrade system. Returning to The Last of Us Part 2 is the ability to modify weapons and upgrade the character’s skills. But Newman explained that, to exemplify the idea that the characters, and players, have to live with their choices, you won’t be able to upgrade everything in one go.
“We put a much stronger emphasis on the importance of the choices you make in the longterm for your character,” Newman said. “Through the weapon upgrade system, through the player upgrade system, there aren’t enough resources in a single playthrough to fully upgrade your character. The choices that you make, you’re going to have to live with. And we wanted to make sure that all the choices that you made had a really noticeable and tangible impact on the way that you play.”Whether this means any sort of New Game+ mode will be included from the jump or introduced later is not stated, but it sounds like players will have to play through The Last of Us Part 2’s journey multiple times to experience the full skill trees.
We do at least know plenty about how the sequel will play thanks to our The Last of Us Part 2 hands-on last year, at which time we also learned about how dogs will impact The Last of Us 2’s gameplay, how Joel and Ellie’s relationship has changed in the sequel, and more.
After The Last of Us Part 2’s delay earlier this year, Sony announced a new June release date for the Naughty Dog sequel, and shortly after Naughty Dog confirmed The Last of Us 2 had gone gold.
Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor and host of IGN’s PlayStation show, Podcast Beyond!