If you had the opportunity to improve on what many consider perfection, how would you do it? That’s the question Naughty Dog asked itself when rebuilding PlayStation 3 classic The Last of Us. the sum of every creative and technical improvement learned over his nearly 40-year development career. With such huge expectations, from inside and outside Naughty Dog, the team set out to do what they do best: exceed expectations.
The various studio teams have detailed the changes you’ll encounter in the game with extensive in-depth development, covering combat animation, lighting, audio, and more. But today, as the title launches worldwide, members of those teams are reflecting on how they chose to answer that question and what it meant to them personally as creators.
The Guiding Principle
“How can we take the most beloved game we’ve ever made and rebuild it?” That’s the question Shaun Escayg, Creative Director and Writer of Naughty Dog, and the team asked themselves. His personal philosophy became a major pillar for developers early on: “We build on it. We’re doubling down on areas that we think would heighten the experience or deepen the storytelling of it, taking all of our abilities and skills and faithfully applying them to this rebuild. Just reimagine everything, accentuate every moment and sell it even more to the player. This was the goal, our guiding light and the challenge at the same time.
It was the North Star Naughty Dog followed when rebuilding The Last of Us for a new generation of hardware. Each team involved in this rebuild had a huge task ahead and took a different approach to meeting this challenge.
Accentuate emotion through lighting
For art director Erick Pangilinan and the visual departments, that meant returning to 2013 and thoroughly studying the original game.
“We tried to identify the most important scenes, scenarios and events in the game that we should focus on to ensure that they maximize the impact on the game,” says Pangilinan. “Priorising and determining how we can pace all these important moments is the first thing to do, to better analyze the original game and better understand it. That’s when you start formulating how you can emphasize that. What are all the lessons we learned while making The Last of Us Part II, and how can we apply that to something we did with ourselves ten years ago?
“What are all the lessons we learned doing The Last of Us Part II, and how can we apply that to something we did with ourselves ten years ago?”
– Artistic Director Erick Pangilinan
Many members of the teams involved in the project share similar stories of how their process meant countless side-by-side comparisons to keep the reconstruction true to the original. Concept artist Sebastian Gromann explained that the team’s challenge was much deeper than simply matching or trying to scale the original visuals. It was essential to analyze the cutscenes, to understand the narrative rhythms and to understand what the two entailed. This naturally led to the question: “How can we use our learnings to highlight [those moments]This could mean studying a screenshot, determining the time of day in a scene, how and what role lighting played, and applying modernized techniques.
“If the scene is about tension for a very intense moment, then we could decrease the fill, increase the key light,” Gromann explains. “Then we could tweak the sliders a bit to push that emotional response a bit more.”
Reshaping an iconic soundscape for 3D audio
As for sound, Audio Director Neil Uchitel explained how extracting original dialogue and audio from the original game gave the team a way to retain the familiar feel of The Last of Us world while improving the sound experience for a modern console. . It involved both new creative and technological developments that in some cases went beyond what they achieved on The Last of Us Part II.
“We actually took a lot of the original sound that we had from The Last of Us, because a lot of it was very iconic, and we didn’t want to [fundamentally] change the experience,” Uchitel said. Retaining the actors’ original performances was key to capturing this familiar experience for fans old and new. However, Uchitel added that while resources were “incredibly limited” on the original PS3/PS4 release, working on the PS5 presented an opportunity to expand the soundscape. And add that they did, greatly expanding the moods on each level, the use of The Last of Us Part II’s Infected Whisper, new recordings for workbench upgrades, and a host of other additions and improvements.
Since Naughty Dog’s previous audio engine was incompatible with new Playstation 5 exclusive audio features, such as the dedicated DSP chip and Tempest Engine audio processing algorithm, Uchitel explains, “Our audio programmers spent more than a year of refactoring our audio engine to be able to take advantage of these new features. [In addition] we’ve changed the underlying mixing and mastering processes, giving the game a much higher degree of fidelity and clarity.
Set personal boundaries
Similar tool changes and renovations happened throughout production, from art to animation and combat, but the team also had to learn restraint. Naughty Dog pushed forward while making sure to set limits on this monumental project.
“Switching to new hardware wasn’t the problem,” Pangilinan said. “I think he was trying to make sure we understood or remembered the art direction and purpose behind every scene in the original. Sometimes we forgot, so we changed them, but it affected the other scenes that followed. A major hurdle was making sure we didn’t edit so much that it would impact the experience of what people remembered.
“Yeah, remakes are tough,” said combat and melee designer Christian Wohlwend while tackling this rebuild. “It’s kind of an exercise in control and patience. It’s not as easy as it sounds to completely redo a game, and it’s easy to start going overboard and overdoing it. At first I felt we would have an easy time until I heard the bar was up, and we thought we could just keep going. But you have to stick to certain limits on the mechanical side.
“Remakes are an exercise in control and patience…it’s easy to start going overboard and overdoing it.”
– Combat Designer Christian Wohlwend
Returning to The Last of Us carried a lot of emotional weight for everyone working on the game. Many members shared the same sense of being extraordinarily proud and never doubting the high standard the team had previously set for itself.
Pangilinan talks about how the original pushed him to raise the bar for the quality of his work and how happy he was to get a second chance. Uchitel says how proud he is of the audio team Naughty Dog has built over the years and how amazed he is at the level of skill they have achieved with the game. Chief Cinematic Animator Eric Baldwin and the lead programmer John Bellomy shared their ambitions and those of their team to ensure that the most important aspects and factors of a rebuild of this caliber are met.
Game director Matthew Gallant sums up the studio’s feelings on this project powerfully: “I came into the original The Last of Us as a new member of the team. I was a completely different person. At the time of this remake, I’m a dad and playing through the game and seeing Joel’s actions at the end. It gives me a different feeling than before. I’m glad to be able to review the game, see things from a different angle and understand it from a different point of view, and I hope others can share that same feeling or find their own after all the years passed since then.
Table of Contents
