Last Of Us Part II Writer Talks Inspiration For His Stories
What inspires the writers of The Last Of Us to do better stories? What motivates them?
One of the biggest things for writers in any medium is to find inspiration for what they want to write, as well as the desire to tell a special story. This is very true for Neil Druckmann, the creative director and writer for The Last of Us and Last of Us Part II. He talked about his journey at Naughty Dog during the recent DICE convention, noting that when they went from Jak and Daxter to Uncharted, he was thrilled:
”I was of the mindset of, how do we tell better stories in games?” he explained. “We were a studio making cartoony mascot action games. And then we were telling stories about a character who doesn’t wear a crazy outfit. To be able to get on that and help shape it was like a dream.”
Then, after Uncharted, there were talks of a Jak and Daxter reboot, but he and the rest of the team wanted to do something deeper, which became The Last of Us.
“We asked [company management], can we do something else? And they said yes, sure. We started talking about how we develop characters through gameplay and it grew and evolved and became The Last of Us.”
As for the games that inspired him to do deep stories, he recalled Monkey Island and Half-Life as big influences on him.