A Bloomberg report that rocked the industry this week revealed that Naughty Dog is currently working on a PlayStation 5 remake of The Last of Us – despite the game first coming out on PS3 in 2013 and then being remastered for the PS4 in 2014. This means that if the remake comes out this year – there is no date mentioned in the article by journalist Jason Schreier – it will just be eight years between the original and the remake.
There were six years between the first Resident Evil and its legendary GameCube remake, although technology advanced at a different pace at the time, and Capcom’s return to the Spencer Mansion was transformative. Meanwhile, the original version of Joel and Ellie’s cross-country escapade is still perfectly playable on PS3 – and it’s even better in remastered form on PS4, which of course works perfectly on PS5.
So what does it matter? It may be worth emphasizing that while the Bloomberg article is excellent, it contains only part of the story. While we trust the information is accurate, we don’t know how Sony plans to sell the proposed remake and how much resources it has been allocated to the project. With these important details excluded – presumably the platform holder would have preferred to reveal this in his own time – we’re missing a big piece of the puzzle.
Our assumption has always been that PlayStation plans to resell The Last of Us: Part II on PS5, as evidenced by the lack of updates to the title since launch. While Ghost of Tsushima and – ironically, given the sequel never took off – Days Gone have been patched to run at 60 frames per second in 4K on the next-gen console, Naughty Dog’s survival horror sequel is still performing. exactly the same as on a PS4 Pro.
We know the California developer has big plans for Factions to succeed in multiplayer mode, and we envisioned a future scenario that would include some sort of remaster bundling with the online shooter similar to the Deluxe Edition of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles. Morales. Now we wonder if the platform proprietor is effectively remaking The Last of Us in the sequel’s engine – leveling the presentation and gameplay – and mapping out some sort of complete edition.
With the recordings of the television show scheduled for this summer, Sony clearly expects an increase in interest in the franchise; and last but not least, The Witcher’s Netflix adaptation increased sales of CD Projekt RED’s PS4 role-playing game by a whopping 544 percent. It would certainly make sense to give new fans of the franchise an easy gateway – even if those original versions of the game are still available and perfectly playable.
Naughty Dog will probably also be working on a new intellectual property, but team sizes are huge these days and ideas take time to get started. Assuming that’s what’s happening at the developer, it needs work for the rest of his team or else it loses talent through layoffs. Perhaps that’s another reason behind the remake’s existence, even if development has already started in San Diego.
As we mentioned earlier, Bloomberg’s article gives us only a small portion of the story, and now that Sony is hesitant to comment – well, we won’t know the full story until it’s willing to speak. 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?