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The Last of Us was one of the biggest new IP successes of the last generation – but its developers feared the game was going to be a big flop.
"We thought it was going to tank," co-director Bruce Straley said in the Conversations With Creators video below, as reported by GameSpot. We thought we were going to ruin the name and image that’s been so heartily built for years with blood, sweat, and tears. We thought we were ruining Naughty Dog’s image."
So what was the problem? As explained by lead designer Anthony Newman, the studio was concerned about some key aspects of the gameplay.
"A big part of it was on the mechanical side,” he added. I thought, ‘We’ll be lucky to scrape by with an 85 Metacritic’. Just because it wasn’t gelling. It wasn’t coming together. So it a set of really lucky breaks in terms of gameplay decisions we made that really made everything fall into place and turned it into a fun game."
The game eventually won itself a 95 per cent Metacritic average.
Voice actor Nolan North claimed that The Last of US 2 is already in production at the studio.
