A Bloomberg report that shook the industry this week revealed that Naughty Dog is currently working on a remake for PlayStation 5 of The Last of Us – despite the game’s first release on the PS3 in 2013 and then remastered for the PS4 in 2014. It means that , if the remake is released this year – there is no date mentioned in the article by journalist Jason Schreier – will only be eight years between the original and its remake.
There were six years between the first Resident Evil and its legendary GameCube remake, although technology was advancing at a different rate back then, and Capcom’s return to Spencer Mansion was transformative. Meanwhile, the original version of Joel and Ellie’s cross-country getaway is still perfectly rendered on the PS3 – and it’s even better remastered on the PS4, which runs flawlessly on the PS5, of course.
So what does it give? Well, it may be worth noting that while the Bloomberg article is excellent, it only includes part of the story. Although we are confident that the information is correct, we do not know how Sony intends to sell the proposed remake and how many resources are allocated to the project. With these important details excluded – probably the platform owner would have preferred to reveal this in due course – we are missing a major piece of the puzzle.
Our assumption has always been that PlayStation intends to resell The Last of Us: Part II on PS5, as evidenced by the lack of title updates since its release. While characters like Ghost of Tsushima and – ironically, given its sequel have never escaped the earth – Days Gone were right to run at 60 frames per second in 4K on the next generation console, the sequel Naughty Dog’s survival horror continues just like on a PS4 Pro.
We know that the Californian developer has big plans for watching Factions in multiplayer mode and we thought of a future scenario in which a kind of remaster was included in the online shooter similar to the Deluxe edition of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles. Morales. Now we are thinking about whether the owner of the platform actually restores The Last of Us in the engine of its continuation – the presentation and the game respecting the same standard – and planning a kind of complete edition.
With the TV show scheduled to begin filming this summer, Sony is clearly expecting an increase in interest in the franchise; after all, the Wizard The Netflix adaptation boosted sales of the launch of the PS4 role-playing game from CD Projekt RED by up to 544%. It would certainly make sense to give new fans of the franchise an easy entry point – even if those original versions of the game are still available and can be played perfectly.
Naughty Dog will probably work on a new intellectual property, but the size of the teams is huge nowadays and it takes time for the ideas to gesture. Assuming this happens to the developer, then he will need work for the rest of his team, otherwise he will lose his talent through layoffs. Maybe that’s another reason behind the remake’s existence – even though development began in San Diego.
As we alluded to earlier, Bloomberg’s article gives us only a small part of the story, and with Sony reluctant to comment – well, we won’t know the full story until he’s willing to talk. But we can ask a few simple questions while we wait: would you buy a remake for The Last of Us? How much would you be willing to pay? And what kind of changes and improvements would you like to see?