How do you find other sub-stories to tell with it? One of them is this romantic story between these two girls and how that develops,” says Druckmann. “We don’t want to tell a story that’s just dark on top of dark - we can’t sustain that. “It felt like if they were just friends, the story would work on one level, but if there was this other, romantic layer it made the story a lot more interesting,” Druckmann says of the DLC’s storyline.Īging Ellie up in the sequel allowed for Druckmann to portray more of her romantic life and lend a heavy tale a bit of light and heart. Rarely seen in triple-A games’ playable character roles, Ellie is also openly gay, a facet of her character that was first explored in the companion comic book series The Last of Us: American Dreams, a prequel in which Ellie has a best friend named Riley whom she has a crush on, and later in the first game’s official downloadable content expansion, Left Behind. While Joel served as the original game’s protagonist and main playable character, the sequel shifts the spotlight to Ellie, now 19, as she embarks on a mission of revenge against a newly introduced group that has committed some atrocious crime against those she loves.

Along the way, the duo encounter a number of other survivors who are also trying to navigate this new, brutal world, many of whom have seemingly lost their core humanity along the way. Part 2 is a direct continuation of the original’s story, which focused on a man named Joel who shepherded a 14-year-old girl, Ellie, across a postapocalyptic America overrun by violent, rabid humans inflected by parasitic spores in a global pandemic. “It felt like, if we do this right - and it’s not going to be easy, this is a challenging story - I think it’s really going to stick with people.”

“Every time you make a sequel, you risk soiling the franchise if it’s bad,” says Druckmann. In the sequel, Druckmann - who returns as writer and director - is hoping to further explore themes too rarely examined in video games. 'FIFA' Game Franchise Drives Electronic Arts Quarterly Revenue Rise

Neil druckmann the last of us 2