The Last of Us II

MISHAWAKA – The news of The Last of Us II’s un­for­tu­nate de­lay has had a mixed re­cep­tion from fans. The leak­ing of game footage on­line has had Sony scram­bling to block videos. 

De­spite be­ing out­side my usual range of re­view, this de­vel­op­ment has re­cently caught my at­ten­tion. First and fore­most, Naughty Dog’s up­com­ing se­quel to one of the most highly praised games in the past decade, The Last of Us II, has been re­cently de­layed due to, shock­ingly, COVID-19. Pre­dictably, fans haven’t been happy about this, but there have been some un­fore­seen con­se­quences as a re­sult of the new and in­def­i­nite de­lay, an­nounced in early April. 

Shortly af­ter news of the de­lay had been an­nounced, a few videos showed up on the in­ter­net re­veal­ing footage of the game. Fans quickly took note of this, with some spec­u­lat­ing it was a dis­grun­tled Naughty Dog team mem­ber leak­ing footage early as a re­sult of the de­lay. These ru­mors re­main largely un­con­firmed; the only cer­tainty was the videos weren’t in­tended to be re­leased, ev­i­denced by Sony copy­right claim­ing them and tak­ing them down. In my re­search to find what these clips showed off, all the links I tried on var­i­ous in­for­ma­tion boards and game ar­ti­cles led to re­moved videos. 

This did­n’t stop sev­eral peo­ple from down­load­ing the videos for pri­vate use, which does­n’t help me out much, and oth­ers from writ­ing about the min­i­mal de­tails the footage ap­par­ently did re­veal, which DID help me out. Al­legedly, the videos were of a few set pieces in the game, one fea­tur­ing the char­ac­ters on horses rid­ing through a snowy, moun­tain­ous re­gion. An­other video fea­tured a seg­ment of game­play where the player con­trols the deuter­ag­o­nist of the first ti­tle, El­lie, play­ing the gui­tar. Sev­eral fans com­mented on the qual­ity of this sec­tion, say­ing the but­ton lay­out for the gui­tar is sur­pris­ingly er­gonomic and ac­cu­rate. 

Be­yond the leaked footage, though, sev­eral fans of the se­ries are reel­ing from an­other dis­ap­point­ment: Sony has be­gun re­fund­ing dig­i­tal pre­orders of The Last of Us II. Un­for­tu­nately for these zeal­ous con­sumers, as a re­sult of the de­lay, Sony not only is­sued re­funds for the ti­tle if it was pre­ordered dig­i­tally, the game has also dis­ap­peared from the PlaySta­tion Store. This means there are very few peo­ple, if any, with dig­i­tal pre­orders of the game and no way to pur­chase one for the fore­see­able fu­ture. I sus­pect The Last of Us II’s list­ing will reap­pear once the re­lease date has been es­tab­lished, but that date is still up in the air. 

Though it’s not the kind of re­as­sur­ance fans want, there is a small bright side that is­n’t bad. The game is highly sus­pected of be­ing a launch ti­tle for the up­com­ing PlaySta­tion 5. The Last of Us II, along with a Hori­zon: Zero Dawn se­quel, and a few other games, were ru­mored to be the launch ti­tles thanks to a poster on Paste­bin, a site built for sav­ing text tem­porar­ily, on Dec. 3 of 2018. The rea­son I say this is a “bright side” is be­cause so many of the fans for this game praise the story and graph­ics above all else. Look­ing at even early screen­shots of the game, I’m hard-pressed to dis­agree; the game is beau­ti­ful. This be­ing the case, we can ex­pect the game to be nearly im­mac­u­late on the up­com­ing con­sole’s im­proved hard­ware. 

Even through all this news con­cern­ing this in­def­i­nite de­lay, the fans should­n’t lose heart; some peo­ple have posted their up­dated or­ders on Ama­zon, which list the new re­lease date as early as June 23. A bit less than a month af­ter the pre­vi­ous re­lease date is hardly earth-shat­ter­ing, as far as I’m con­cerned.