WARNING: this article will SPOIL PLOT DETAILS for The Last of Us Part II. If you don’t want the plot spoiled, turn away now.
The Last of Us Part II is out now on PS4, and players are finally able to discover what happened to Joel and Ellie following the ending of the first game. Players who have finished the game will know that it’s much longer than the first, running about 25 hours, but it turns out that a lot of content was cut during production.
In an interview with IndieWire, the game’s director Neil Druckmann and narrative lead Halley Gross, who wrote The Last of Us Part II together, cover many details about the game’s plot and characters–including some details about what was cut.
While the main action of the game happens across three consecutive days, experienced from the perspective of both Ellie and Abby, the original plan was for this section to cover five days.
“There was a whole side story where Ellie went to the Seraphite island, and we had so much more to say about the Seraphites and Ellie’s journey there and she’s going through like the different layers of Hell and she still keeps going forward,” Druckmann says.
Joel’s death scene was originally different, too–the original plan was for him to cry out for Sarah, his long-since-deceased daughter, but actor Troy Baker suggested that it would be a more effective scene if he did not say anything.
Gross adds that at one point Joel was going to have a girlfriend, and a different ending, although she does not elaborate. Druckmann also says that they built a playable section where Ellie hunts down the boar you encounter in the museum, but it slowed down the game’s pacing too much.
Druckmann has previously said that he is not sure what Naughty Dog’s next project will be yet, but it might be The Last of Us Part III. If you’ve finished the game, be sure to watch GameSpot’s spoiler chat for our editors’ thoughts.
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