Interview: The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered’s director explains why the PS5 upgrade is worth it

It’s been a strange few years for Naughty Dog.

While the crown jewel of PlayStation Studios has seen the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us go on to become a huge, award-winning hit, in gaming, Naughty Dog has had an uncharacteristically quiet few years.

It was announced late last year that the company had decided to end developing a multiplayer project based on The Last of Us. The troubled project, which had been mentioned as far back as 2018, and then formally re-announced in 2022, was cancelled, much to the disappointment of fans. While Naughty Dog did attempt to reassure fans that several ambitious projects are on the way, it’s now been four years since the studio’s last original game, and there’s no word on what’s next from Sony‘s hit factory.

The spiralling development cost of video games, combined with Naughty Dog’s reputation for being a best-in-class AAA game developmer, means that the long development cycles are fairly understandable for most. However, for a fan base that enjoyed Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, The Last of Us, Uncharted 4: A Theif’s End, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and The Last of Us Part 2 in what was just over 10 years, some are losing patience.

This impatience wasn’t helped when a remake of The Last of Us, now dubbed “Part 1,” to fit with the sequel’s naming convention, was released on PlayStation 5. While it made perfect sense from a synergistic perspective to have a PlayStation 5 version of the story that was taking the world by storm in the TV adaptation, fans debated if it was too soon for a full-scale remake of a game that had already received a remaster on the PlayStation 4.

It’s that debate that sets the stage for our conversation with Matthew Gallant, a Naughty Dog veteran who directed The Last Of Us Part 1, and now, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered. The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered is a £10 upgrade for existing owners of the game, which adds a new rouge-like mode; No Return, a new behind-the-scenes look at some unfinished content, dubbed The Lost Levels, as well as performance improvements, and even a way to play the surprisingly deep guitar mini-game at any time.

What is it like working on a remaster of something that, in the eyes of many players and critics, is already pretty close to flawless?

Matthew Gallant: It was certainly something I took very seriously. Thankfully, I had worked on both games, so I had a lot of context as to what went into them and what was important. Obviously, I also had Neil Druckmann, Anthony Newman, and Kurt Margenau, the original directors of the game that I could refer to, they were mentoring me and helping me out a lot of this.

I think the reason we went into this project, both The Last of Us Part 1 and now The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered was because we love these games. We know players love these games, and we want someone who’s picking up The Last of Us Part 2 for the first time to have the best version of it. A version that’s native to the PS5, a version that has all the haptic features, had different performance and fidelity modes. So, yes, pressure is the right word, but it was also love.

You’ve worked at Naughty Dog for over a decade, and now you’re the most tenured game director at the studio outside of Druckmann, Newman and Margenau. What experiences prepared you for the step up to the director’s chair?

One of the great things about working just in the design department in general is that it’s inherently a very collaborative role. You’re working all the time with all the other departments. Back in the good old days when we were all in the office more, I was always one of the ones running around from one end of the office to the other and saying, “I need this artist, this producer, and this programmer right now to solve this problem.” So, to some extent, that blends really nicely into a directorial role because you already know everyone, and they already know you.

You’ve been collaborating with them and working together and working through problems. I always knew that our department directors were good, but I didn’t realize how good until I stepped into this role. They are the real experts in their craft. You’ll ask them about something small, and then they’ll go off about, “Well, when you’re coming into this room, we could rack the lighting just slightly, and it would show the player what they should be looking for, and this will enhance the mood of the scene!”

It’s such a pleasure to work with this team, and they’re the reason I’ve been here so long.

Many players have said it’s too soon for a remaster of The Last of Us Part 2. What improvements would you say make this version worth upgrading to?

The leap between TLOU 2 and TLOU 2 Remastered is really closer to that of The Last of Us 2013 to The Last of Us Remastered that we released on PS4. We released The Last of Us 1 at the end of the PS3 life-cycle so it was kind of a similar endeavor in terms of releasing The Last of Us Part 2 at the end of the PS4 cycle. We got every ounce of power out of the PS4. We hit all the limits, so we bring it to PS5 and instantly you can increase the render settings and increase the level of detail, and the lighting quality, we can basically enhance everything. I think stuff can be subtle, but it’s certainly going to be the best and most beautiful version of the game that is possible to play, that’s more of a holistic view rather than something you’re going to call out moment to moment.

For me, I’m a haptics nerd. I really love the DualSense controller, I really love the haptics and, for context, we on the design team were the ones authoring the rumble on our previous games. Rumble is a great tool, but it’s very broad, it’s a blunt instrument. It’s an engine, essentially. You can choose how fast it spins, but that’s pretty much it. There was a lot of finessing to it, trying to sync up action on screen with rumble. Haptics are instantaneous, they can be very subtle, and they can be very small, like when you’re petting the dog in Jackson. You’ll obviously notice it when there are explosions and gunfights, but we always wanted you to notice the rain in Seattle.

Another change I’ll call out is that we were able to bring over a lot of the accessibility improvements we made for TLOU Part 1 into this. The biggest one was cinematic descriptions. So we now have those audio-described cinematics that we didn’t have in the original game. So now players who are blind or players with low vision can have more story context of what’s going on in the cinematic with those audio descriptions.

“Haptics are instantaneous, they can be very subtle, and they can be very small, like when you’re petting the dog in Jackson. You’ll obviously notice it when there are explosions and gunfights, but we always wanted you to notice the rain in Seattle.”

TLOU 2 Remastered includes The Lost Levels, three work-in-progress levels that were cut from the original game. Why was it important to include The Lost Levels in TLOU 2 Remastered?

I think the process of making games can be very mysterious, sometimes intentionally. So players don’t get to see what it’s like when a level is in development, they don’t get to see iterations, so we thought it was a cool opportunity to show off what ended up on the cutting room floor and why. I also loved that we were able to do a lot of commentary for it, not just drop you into an alpha and let you wander. We’ve given you insight into what the level was trying to do, where it would have fit into the larger narrative arc and what we were trying to accomplish.

Very few AAA games have this, and I wish they did, I always find them fascinating, even to me as someone who has a bit more of an idea of what it takes to make a game, but to see another studio’s process, what their levels look like, how they are noodling on their own process is fascinating. You get to see how rough these levels look, and to us as developers, they look that rough for years. Even worse than that. You’re working with rough clay and it’s missing 10 rounds of iteration of little details and lights and textures and everything. You’re getting to see it before the magic dust. I think it gives players a really cool insight into the process.

The most significant piece of content in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered aside from the main game is No Return, a new rogue-like mode which sees players playing through remixed versions of levels from the main game. What’s the story behind that?

When we were looking at doing The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered we had a table of what this game was going to be. Was it going to be a next-gen remaster that you’d sort of expect where we could go in and make it look better, do some haptics, make it sort of a known quantity, but then we saw we had this opportunity to do some really cool things. We were exploring things like bringing over accessibility options and the speed run mode and some bonus skins. We have some developers I’ll affectionately call music nerds who had some amazing ideas for the guitar free play mode, and once we had added all that, it inspired us to keep going and do in the direction of No Return.

When we make combat in The Last of Us it’s usually in service of the story, but we thought about what if the combat was the star? We have this really robust combat system, these AI systems, all of this stuff that’s incredibly flexible and has a lot of depth. You usually only get one way of playing through an encounter in the story so we thought what if we took those systems and let you upgrade your character and have this different experience?

“When we make combat in The Last of Us it’s usually in service of the story, but we thought about what if the combat was the star? We have this really robust combat system, these AI systems, all of this stuff that’s incredibly flexible and has a lot of depth.”

Combat encounters in The Last of Us can have a lot of strategy, but really we put all this time and effort and art into a scenario, and you play through this area once in most instances. Players really love the combat in The Last of Us Part 2 and we were hearing of players who would just do encounter select over and over trying to stealth through a situation or take in on in a different way, and if you’re someone that wants to engage with the game in that way, there are actually kind of limited options as to how you can do it before No Return.

Was there ever any discussion about whether No Return would trivialize the extreme violence in the main game and lessen its impact as a narrative tool?

Yes, we spoke about it a lot. Firstly, you’re supposed to play this after you’ve completed the story, not just because of spoilers but also because the main game ramps up teaching you how to do things that No Return doesn’t do, as we expect you to know how to deal with Clickers, how to deal with the dogs, etc. We talked a lot about how we use violence in the main story to try to explore the themes of the cycle of vengeance and things like that, and there’s no way you could similarly honour those themes in a mode like this, so we think of it much more as an arcade mode.

The most difficult thing about working in The Last of Us universe is the groundedness. When we’re making crafting items or enemies or stuff like that, we always have to make it believable. The worst thing a combat mechanic could do would be to take you out of this experience and make you realize you’re playing a video game. Even down to enemy characters talking to each other in combat, hunting you out, and making them deal with very naturalistic environments, we put a lot of effort into the main story to make sure it’s grounded.

But in No Return, it was an opportunity to take off that constraint. What are some ways we can make the combat shine, and what can we do with these environments you’re used to to surprise and shock you? I was the lead systems designer on the original game so I’m very familiar with just how much we were guiding our combat development around driving a story, so it’s very interesting as a developer to have the opportunity to take that all away.

Before we concluded our conversation we asked Matthew why he thought that remasters like The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered can often be met with backlash from players, when similar rereleases and reprints in the world of film are rarely met with the same skepticism from players.

I don’t understand some of the consternation about what The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered offers. It’s the best way to play The Last of Us Part 2, if you’re a new PlayStation owner and new to the franchise we want to get you the best experience with all the hardware features on a PS5 native version of the game. My sense is there’s an audience for this for whom the idea of a PS5 version is thrilling. I’m also speaking for myself, I’m excited we can bring this to the fans, and if it’s not for everyone, that’s fine.