We were all surprised when reports emerged a month ago that a remake of The Last of Us was in development at Naughty Dog. Given how good the game looks and plays even today, and the fact that it already received a pretty impressive remaster back in 2014, the general feeling among fans has been that The Last of Us is a game that doesn’t really need a remake. After all, it’s hard to be excited for a remake of a game that’s less than a decade old- what can we even expect from it, other than some visual enhancements?
Well, apparently, it’s not going to be that simple. According to an article published recently by Game Reactor, The Last of Us’ remake won’t just entail boosts to performance and resolution. On top of visual upgrades, the remake is allegedly also going to have gameplay enhancements that will leverage the PS5’s hardware and the more capable engine that was used for The Last of Us Part 2, adding new gameplay features as well. “Let’s not blow expectations out of the water by hyping it up too much, but this won’t be a “simple” improvement of resolution, framerate and textures,” Game Reactor writes.
Recently, journalist Jason Schreier – who originally broke the news about the remake – also stated that the project was greenlit at Naughty Dog partially because the studio’s other projects were still in pre-production at the time, essentially meaning they didn’t have any other project to focus on.
Meanwhile, series creator and director Neil Druckmann also recently said that a story outline for The Last of Us Part 3 is already in place, though he added that if Naughty Dog does work on it, it’ll be quite a while before it materializes as anything substantial.