The Last of Us Director Doesn’t Believe He Has the Confidence to Plan Sequels in Advance

gamingbolt.com:

Naughty Dog boss Neil Druckmann has revealed that he doesn’t have any secret plans for sequels to The Last of Us. Speaking at the recent DICE Summit, Druckmann spoke about how difficult such a sequel would be, saying that he didn’t have the confidence that would be required to make it, according to IGN.

In a conversation with Sony Santa Monica’s Cory Barlog, Druckmann spoke about how he doesn’t really see games as franchises, and that he approaches writing stories for his games as if they’re going to be the only release in the series.

“That’s a very easy question for me to answer, because I never think about multiple games, because I’m the game in front of us is so all consuming,” said Druckmann in response to a question about character development over multiple games.

“I think you’re jinxing yourself if you’re starting to think about the sequel when you’re working on the first game. So when I was making The Last of Us 2, yeah, sure. Every once in a while an idea pops in your head of where it might go if we get the chance to do another one. But I just approach it as, ‘what if I never get to do another one?’…I’m not saving some idea for the future. If there’s a cool idea, I’m doing my best to get it into here.”

Druckmann further explained this thought process, stating that when the time comes for a sequel to one of his games, he looks back at the previous title to figure out where he can take the characters, and what plot elements are still left to be explored. “And if I feel like the answer is, they can’t go anywhere, then I go, ‘I think we’ll just kill them off,’” he said.

“I’m half joking, but we just find the next game,” he continued. “When we made Uncharted 1, we had no idea we would do the train sequence of Uncharted 2, or where Nathan Drake would be. We figured it out when we made Uncharted 2. And eventually, the same when we worked on Uncharted 3, same when we worked on Uncharted 4, where we look back and say, ‘How do we not repeat ourselves? Where else could