The former Naurehty Dog programmer spoke about his experience in the studio and an alternative ending in The Last of Us: Part 2

One of the key employees for the Naughty Dog studio in the past, Fran Ice, gave a fairly detailed interview to European journalists. The former developer shared interesting observations about some processes within the team, and also revealed the discussion of a little another finals The Last of Us: Part 2. The ending of the game has become the subject of hot discussions not only in the game community, but also among the developers themselves.

As Fran Ice notes, the Naughty Dog studio gives developers a fairly great creative freedom. Even ordinary programmers had a direct communication channel with Nil Drakmann himself, and they could make him any claims or ideas to improve the project, even if it went beyond their specialization. In general, the team pays a lot of attention to the study of details, both plot and game, which is often ignored in other studios.

As for The Last of Us: Part 2, the entire plot of the game was written and known to all the studio employees at the very beginning of the development of the game. Many employees argued before the release of some plot turns and finals, but in general everyone was satisfied with the dramatic component and the main message of history. The most problems for Naughty Dog arose in order to force the players to empathize with Abby. According to Ais, even it was difficult for him to empathize with the heroine, although he spent a lot of time in the game and knows this character well. But he still believes that in the final product they managed to convey their point of view.

In the final battle with Abby, it was initially assumed that the player would be invited to drown her by clicking on the button, but without the opportunity to do this fully for the player to understand that he must voluntarily save her life. Some testing participants simply continued to press the button to try to kill Abby, but it did not work very well. Fran considered the possibility of providing players of real choice, but he knew that the team would not agree to this, since the story should end in such a way as to more clearly convey the essence of the original story.

Here are other interesting details about The Last of US: Part 2, which the developer said: