A Bloomberg report that shook the industry this week revealed that Naughty Dog is currently working on a remake of The Last of Us on PlayStation 5, although the game was first released on the PS3 in 2013 and then went remaster for the PS4 in 2014. It means that if the remake is released this year (there is no date indicated in the article by journalist Jason Schreier), there will only eight years between the original and its remake.
There were six years between the first Resident Evil and its legendary GameCube remake, though technology was advancing at a different pace back then and Capcom’s return to the Spencer mansion was transformative. Meanwhile, the original version of Joel and Ellie’s field getaway can still play perfectly on PS3, and it’s even better remastered on PS4, which works perfectly on PS5, of course.
So what does it give? Well, maybe it’s worth pointing out that while Bloomberg’s article is excellent, it only includes a part of the story. While we’re confident the information is accurate, we don’t know how Sony plans to sell the proposed remake and how many resources it has allocated to the project. If these important details are excluded (presumably, the platform owner would have preferred to reveal it in due course), we are missing an important piece of the puzzle.
Our guess has always been that PlayStation plans to resell The Last of Us: Part II on PS5, as evidenced by the lack of title updates since the release. While so many characters like Ghost of Tsushima and, ironically, given their sequel never came off the ground, Days Gone have been fixed for running at 60 frames per second in 4K on the next-generation console, the horror sequel to Naughty Dog Survival still works exactly the same as on a PS4 Pro.
We know that the Californian developer has big plans for tracking Factions in multiplayer mode, and we had planned a future scenario where some kind of remaster will be incorporated with the online shooter similar to the Deluxe edition of Spider-Man: Thousands of Marvel. Morales. We are now wondering if the platform owner is effectively redoing The Last of Us in the engine of its sequel (facing the presentation and gameplay to the same standard) and planning some sort of full edition.
With the TV show scheduled to begin shooting this summer, Sony is clearly expecting an increase in interest in the franchise; after all, The wizard The Netflix adaptation increased sales of the PS4 version of CD Projekt RED by 544%. It would certainly make sense to give new fans of the franchise an easy entry point, even if these original versions of the game are still available and can be played perfectly.
Naughty Dog will probably also be working on a new intellectual property, but the size of the teams is huge these days and it takes time to gesture ideas. Assuming this is what is happening to the developer, then he will need work for the rest of his team, otherwise he will lose talent for layoffs. Perhaps this is another reason for the remake’s existence, even if development began in San Diego.
As we alluded to above, the Bloomberg article only provides us with a small piece of the story, and with Sony reluctant to comment, well, we won’t know the full story until it’s ready to talk. But we can ask some 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?