New Last of Us live game could be Naughty Dog's most collaborative game yet

A few days ago The New Yorker published an in-depth article on HBO's new The Last of Us television series airing in January, and nestled in the feature was comments about Naughty Dog's upcoming game projects. In the interview, studio co-president Neil Druckmann indicated that the new game was more like a television series than any other game the studio has made so far. The game wasn't specified, of course, and Druckmann has since clarified the quote.

2

"It's about making our games in an even more collaborative manner! Stoked to show you our projects as soon as we can!" Druckmann said on Twitter.

At the time of writing it appears that Naughty Dog could be working on at least two projects, and they both may or may not be related to The Last of Us universe. Druckmann seems to confirm this when he says projects plural.

One of these projects is confirmed. Back in June, Naughty Dog confirmed that its big new live service game set in the Last of Us franchise would be bigger than TLOU1, and is the studio's most ambitious game yet.

"This game is big. It's as big as any of our singleplayer games we've done and in some ways bigger. It's got a story, the way we're telling that story is very unique, it's got a brand new cast of characters that come from another place," Neil Druckmann said in June.

"We're creating something much larger than a mode," Naughty Dog's Rochelle Snyder said on the PlayStation Blog at the time. "We're growing our studio significantly to ensure we build this full-scale, standalone game, with its massive scope and immense world."

It's likely that this is the project that Druckmann is referring to. A live game requires lots of quests and content, and it might be impossible for Druckmann to handle all of that by himself, ergo the "team" of writers insinuation.

So what's the other project? It depends. It could be The Last of Us Part III, however the game seemed to be neatly wrapped up in Part II, or it could be something different and new.

Whatever the case may be, Naughty Dog developers have a direct say in what projects they work on next. There's a consensus taken at the studio that determines what games they tackle on the horizon.

Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells said this about the process:

"[What we choose to work on] is really driven by the team, just like almost every decision we make at the studio is somehow trying to represent what the team wants the most. We definitely don't want to have people working on something that they don't have the creative motivation to work on," Wells said.

"Just like whatever success we had with Uncharted, if we were on Uncharted 6 or 7 by now, I think the creative spark would be pretty weak and I just don't think we'd be doing our best work.

"We always try to take the temperature of the team and see where their motivations lie, to see what's exciting to them, and try to steer it towards that.

"I don't that it'd do us any good and it certainly wouldn't do our fans any good if we were weren't making something we weren't loving."