The Last of Us Part 1 considered every detail, co-directors say

Published after publishing Last of UsPart 2Naughty Dog began to ruminate about a remake. “What if we could remake Last of Us?” asked creative director Shaun Escayg. Imagine if there were two things people could do? Last of UsAnd Part 2All this, without visual dissonance, and on one console.

It will be possible to play with both older and new players soon. Part I of The Last of UsOn Sept. 2, a remake from the 2013 title is scheduled to release. This will make the Sony classic more easily accessible on both Windows PC and PlayStation 5. It is not a mistake. Part 1This is an exact remake of the original video game. The story has not changed. But technological leaps in both combat and cinematics have added even more depth — more watery tear ducts and darting eyes, more sneaky and intelligent AI, and more female runners.

That’s the difference between a remake and a remaster. The remake allows developers to create major modifications, but it’s the art of knowing when to back off, said Matthew Gallant, Escayg, and Polygon interviewer Tuesday.

Image by Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Polygon: I think I might be the only person who hadn’t played Last of UsBefore you PlayStation 5 remake. Who did you make this new version for — is it for new players like me or fans of the original? What will these two distinct groups receive? What is The Last of Us Part 1

Shaun Escayg: For me, it’s for both. It’s for existing fans and for new players. The treatment Part I of The Last of UsAs a love letter to the franchise and to our fans. We felt a great deal of pressure to create this game because of how the original is regarded as one of the most important games of all time. You’re coming into Naughty Dog legacy — gaming history and legacy — when touching such a franchise.

New fans were welcome to join us. Part 1And Part 2 You can work without interruptions in technology and visual fidelity. It was also important that we expand the accessibility of our products. Part 1 Starting at Part 2So that more people can play the game. Ultimately, we wanted to stay faithful and true to the original core experience, preserve everything we loved about the original game, and just use all our artistic abilities — all our recent technological advancements — to just enhance and heighten every aspect of this.

Matthew Gallant: I think there’s stuff in this game to serve both audiences. […] When we’re looking at Part I of The Last of Us, we know that there’s going to be lots of people like yourself playing it for the first time. Some people have a PlayStation 5 for their first PlayStation. There’s the PC audience that we’re looking forward to. We’re also anticipating that there’ll be some interest in checking out the video game for people who watch the HBO show.

For all of these different new audiences, we didn’t want their starting point in the series to be going back two console generations to play this game. While it has held up very well, and in many ways is timeless and is still a treat to play, it’s visibly aged in a lot of ways. It was very limited in many ways due to the technology limitations that were available back then. You had to have so much creativity to sort of load everything in front of your eyes and then unload it behind you.

There was no hard limit to the memory of the PS3; it was just something that you had to deal with constantly. We didn’t want players who were getting into the series for the first time to come in at one console generation and then immediately jump to Part 2 of “The Last of Us” — it’s kind of a jarring experience and quality jump. It just wouldn’t feel continuous. It was my goal to bridge that gap, and give people a great place to start in the franchise.

But the other goal — for returning players, they’re going to find a ton to really appreciate about Part I of The Last of Us.

Shaun was filming the cinematics, which was one of the reasons Shaun and me split the game. I was a mere fan and got to see the upgrades. I just got to enjoy them — I didn’t have a hand in them at all. I was watching some of the cinematics and there’s a scene where Joel and Tess are discussing what to do about Ellie. They aren’t sure if they’re going to commit to taking her to the Fireflies. Joel would like to take her back home and give up. On the exterior, he’s presenting as very gruff. There’s a very cold demeanor. He’s just like, You can take her back. Whatever. I don’t care. But if you know the overall arc of the story, there’s a subtext here. There’s an interior to the character that’s coming from a place of hurt, fear, pain, and sadness. Watching those cinematics that have been redone, they more closely matched the original actors’ performances, where all that nuance existed. It is easy to see the conflict. It is possible to see how the individual feels and what they are saying.

Image by Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Yes, I understand that combat experiences can change. What will players experience?

Gallant: Joel’s core abilities are faithful to the original game. But one of the ways it’s changed is that we’ve got nine to 10 years of technology improvements in our AI. When we were originally developing a combat encounter, we didn’t have as good tools for managing the flow of combat. Some encounters had limitations regarding the number of enemies that we could keep alive simultaneously. To maintain the illusion that we were fighting a larger battle, we kept despawning enemies in front of us and creating new enemies before you.

We didn’t always have to do that in the remake. There could be more enemies at once. Additionally, combat AI encounter managers level stuff had to have been a lot harder-scripted in order for it to work today. […] We had to hand-sculpt a lot of that, because there wasn’t any alternative back in the day. In the intervening decade we’ve developed a much more flexible AIO where we can mark up a space with different strong positions to defend. It’s more about having an ecosystem of things that can happen. AI will try to be more surprising and dynamic, and it’ll also flank and interact with you more.

When you play a really dynamic encounter, like the bookstore fight in Pittsburgh, if you try different tactics in that fight, we’re hoping the AI will respond to you in more dynamic ways. They’ll be flanking you, coming in from angles you don’t expect. They’ll be coordinating and trying to respond to what you’re doing in a more intelligent way.

Let’s go over some of the accessibility options, too. Do any of these appeal to you in particular? What are you most excited to see in this game?

Gallant:It was necessary to take advantage of the accessibility options available. Part 2 of “The Last of Us”. At its core, it’s enabling players who are blind and have low vision to be able to play through the entire game. This game should not be a barrier to their enjoyment. And for one, that’s really exciting, because a lot of these players got to be fans of Last of Us Part 2. They have never played Part 1. They didn’t have all the context for these characters in the story, so just even opening up that experience for them is really exciting.

We have new technology and accessibility options. Part I of The Last of Us, there’s two I’d really love to highlight. The first one is that we’ve added audio descriptions for the cinematics. And what that means is that for a blind player or player with low vision, they can’t see what’s happening in a scene. They don’t know the unspoken interactions between the characters. They can’t see that one character is aiming a gun at another one, and they don’t have the context for what’s being said.

So, cinematic audio descriptions — what that means is, in between those little breaks in dialogue, someone has gone in and now a narrator says what’s happening in the scene, like sets the scene of what is on the screen, what are the characters doing. To make movies and TV more accessible to blind persons, we use this technique. Descriptive Video Works is a professional company who does the same service as us for movie trailers and TV. They were great partners. It takes a lot of skill to find the perfect description that fits between the dialogue and gives you all the necessary information in the shortest possible way. Partly this was a result of our blind accessibility work. Part 2 of “The Last of Us”. Like, yeah, we’ve removed barriers from the gameplay experience, and players could finish the game. But there was a lot of story, context, and environmental context — the richness of the world — that still wasn’t accessible to blind players.

The other accessibility feature that’s new that I’ll briefly touch on is something that is enabled by the DualSense. This new feature allows users to hear dialogue through vibrations and haptic vibrations via DualSense. We tried this prototype concept. This was very popular with accessibility experts and play testers. The idea here is that if you’re deaf, you have the subtitles that tell you how the line is being said. You can sense the accent by feeling the lines. Which line was it delivered? How did it feel? When you can feel that on the controller and read the subtitles, it’s opening more of that story context and that richness to players with disabilities, specifically deaf players.

Image by Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment

There have been many changes since then. Last of Us It was originally released. The time was when there were a lot dads involved in gaming, so the fatherhood-like bond between Joel and Ellie was significant. And it was major that people could play as Ellie, even for a few parts — now we have this whole game where we play as her. Is it possible to see how culture has changed since the original game was released?

Escayg: We approached the game with certain pillars that we didn’t want to break down from the original experience that our fans truly resonated with. We wanted to explore all of the options available. Part 2 Take into Part 1. But our guiding light pillar was, “OK, does this add anything new to the experience? Will this detract from the experience?” Again, this is arguably one of the greatest games made. We’re always putting on gloves as we approach these decisions and are being very deliberate about what we choose to keep and lose.

Our approach was primarily about punctuation. What can we do to raise the stakes and get deeper into emotion? Playing in space and reliving those moments can make them more real. There’s more of a sense of realism or dynamic movement and life in those worlds, like landing on a vehicle and it shakes. Or you’re attacked in combat by a [military] truck and you take cover by a bookcase that splinters, or a car that rolls on its chassis when it’s being bombarded by these bullets.

This is what you see in cinematics. New lighting, new environments — but also characters that emote and express in a much more deep way than we could have previously on the tech we had.

There’s a scene that, if you have the opportunity to play the old one and compare, you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s where Ellie and Joel are having this argument when she runs off into the farmhouse at Tommy’s. Her eyes begin to flutter and her face turns flush as she realizes that Joel has abandoned her. Joel can spit out his tongue when he is angry.

Or when Ellie and Riley are dancing on the display in the mall, Ellie stops and has this moment where she realizes, “Oh, my best friend — the love of my life — is going to run away with the Fireflies. I may never see her again.” You can see that conflict behind what’s spoken. This microeye dart can show you the conflict in her head. There are no words. It’s just in there. That’s how we elevate and bring more to our fans today. Even if you’ve played this game a hundred times before, look at it now in this context, and see how much more layers of emotion and subtext is in or behind these characters.

What is the difference between making a game new and creating a remaster?

Gallant: The first thing I can touch on is just, like, what is the difference between a remake and a remaster, at least from our perspective, because we’ve remastered quite a few of our games, and explain typically what that means. Remastering is more technical and programming-oriented. You will need to take the original assets, code, and transfer it to your PlayStation 4, increasing the framerate, pushing out log distances, and exporting textures in a higher resolution. You don’t go in and fundamentally reconsider the design choices you made. You’re kind of just making numbers bigger for it, to put it maybe inelegantly.

We can really get in there and reconsider the fundamental decisions for a remake. We had one advantage: Part I of The Last of UsWe knew many of the initial decisions. Last of UsHardware limitations were a major factor in the limitation of the game. Shaun, Shaun, and I worked together on the original games. A lot of creative leads worked also on the original game. Part 1. We knew intimately that the reason this room is pretty simple and plain wasn’t a conscious choice. It wasn’t something we did deliberately. Our memory was exhausted. It was more important than the space before it. We also wanted them to be amazing. So this kind of transition space was pretty plain, and we got the opportunity to go back and go, “Well, what could this space be? Were there any opportunities to incorporate environmental storytelling? How could we make the world feel richer and more detailed?”

This is best illustrated by the State House Museum in Boston. These back offices are not very impressive in comparison to the ones that were used in the original game. It was just a bunch of offices. We went back, and we thought of it at the concept art level: “What could this space have been? What would you have in the back rooms of a museum?” We added an art restoration station. All the tools, brushes and framed photos they needed to restore the art were added. The busts were of colonial figures, which they kept in their storage.

Another one is just, it’s silly things like, in a lot of these encounters, we can only have so many looks loaded at the same time. There might be a fight in the original game that only has male runners, because we couldn’t afford to have the female runners loaded in at the same time. This allows us to have more variety of looks in fights.

Also, it was stuff like leaves. Foliage is a very costly item. It’s lots of little details, and it’s very complicated to render. It is one of the most important elements in Last of Us is just the beauty of the natural world and the natural world reclaiming these spaces — the beauty, but also the danger in that. If you look at areas like Pittsburgh or Bill’s town, those areas we got to go in and just make them so much more lush and detailed, have this beautiful foliage that’s totally overgrown. This honors the original vision.

Escayg:The approach seems measured. When we come into a remake like this, it’s a lot of what we don’t add that makes the difference. Having all the technology doesn’t always mean that if we added something, we’re going to get this better game, right?

We’re always kind of measuring everything against the original. “Does this actually make this fight better? Do you think this exploration is better? Does this make the cinematic experience better? Is it annoying? Is it beauty for the sake of it?”

There’s this constant, very deliberate back and forth, a tug of war between wanting to go crazy and or make it look more beautiful than it needs to be. I’ll give you an example. You know what a quarantine zone means? You’re in a quarantine zone. It’s safe. Narratively, it’s supposed to be safe. I mean, it’s seedy but safe. It’s a stronghold of humanity. Right? But it’s also cold and devoid of life, outside of human life or humanity. It’s not lush, but it’s safe. There’s a juxtaposition of being outside of the walls of the quarantine zone, where everything is overgrown and beautiful and lush, but dangerous, right? Sometimes you’re inclined to go, “Oh, let’s just, let’s make this beautiful tree in the military city.” And it’s very easy to go overboard, like, “Let’s put a lot of canned foods on the shelves,” — but no, resources are slim. What is your current state of mind? Is this actually helping?

Refraint is the best approach to making this case a success. We need to control our urge to go too far and make sure that we use only the best improvements in order to make it work.

Image by Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment

What’s Naughty Dog’s strategy with regard to remasters and remakes? They do a lot of them. What impact does this have on business and timeline decisions? They are used to keep talent from moving onto larger IP projects. It’s like a more relaxed, less-busy time. Is it different because you already know what the game’s supposed to be?

Escayg: It’s a yes and no answer. If you look at our approach to remakes, it would be after Part 2, as early as that, there was this sort of rumbling in the studio, like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could [do a remake]?” There was a lot of, “Hey, I would love to play Part 1And Part 2 together, with the same graphics, the same fidelity.” That was sort of a motivator behind this remake. Does it feel restful? No.

Naughty Dog has a passion I love. It’s like nowhere else that I’ve worked. These products are amazing because artists put everything they have into them. And that’s exactly what happened. It was probably one of the most difficult challenges we’ve had. However, we were compelled to create it with the same detail as a Naughty Doggy game. That approach required a great deal of care and attention.

As for business decisions, that’s above Matthew and myself. But I can tell you this was a blueprint of an original game, but it’s almost the same effect of the team, because now we have the expectations to live up to it. It was the pursuit of that goal and surpassing it that drove this team to their current position.