Rumours suggest that details of The Last of Us 3 have leaked, but I remain unconvinced. As an avowed fan, I would be thrilled if we could expect a new The Last of Us so soon after the last (the third anniversary of Part 2 was just two weeks ago), but I fear that even if these rumours are true, we might be barking up the wrong tree in terms of which TLOU game they claim to represent.
For starters, that The Last of Us 3 will feature “a group of scavengers surviving on the outskirts of a post-apocalyptic city, crammed into a Victorian house that serves as their base”. They also claim that Naughty Dog is casting for a diverse group of new characters. Now, I’m not the only one who read that and thought ‘Isn’t that just Factions 2?’ We already know that Naughty Dog’s new multiplayer game will have a new cast of characters, and will be set in San Francisco, which coincidentally has plenty of iconic Victorian houses. What’s more, the game has been hit with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:delay after delay, so it could easily be early enough i𓂃n development that they are only now casting and recording per🐻formances.
The Last of Us Part 3 starting motion capture this year seems incredibly unlikely. Naughty Dog is still working on Factions and as leakers have claimed, it’s 168澳洲幸运5开﷽奖网:also wไorking on a new single-player fantasy IP. If Part 3 is also in its early stages, the developer is stretched thin. The timeline isn’t impossible. It’s only been three years since The Last of Us Part 2, but Respawn made Jedi Suไrvivor in roughly three years and apart from launch day bugginess, it was a pretty great game. If we assume that Naughty Dog started work on Part 3 as soon as Part 2 was released, then sure, I guess it’s possible. But The Last of Us Part 2 took six years to make, and reportedly included a crunch schedule of 12-hour workdays. Considering this and the fact that the studio is still working on other projects, I’m not convinced that Part 3 is already at the filming stage.
One part of the leak I find entirely plausible is that Ellie will have as big a role in Part 3 as she did in Part 2. Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but I also think that having a whol🌳e new cast of characters for Part 3 when that’s already being done for Factions 2 might be too much of a disconnect from the series. Of course, the game will introduce new characters, and Ellie may be in a completely different phase of her life, but it does make narrative sense to have her in the game since the series has followed her so far. I’m not going to pre-emptively judge a game that we aren’t even sure is in production based on leaks that don’t seem very reliable, but I also trust Naughty Dog to tell a story worth telling. We’ll just have to wait and see if what the leakers say is true, but I wouldn’t put money on it.