The Last Of Us Part 2 Was Originally Inspired By Bloodborne

We've seen many times over the years that games can make some pretty drastic changes during development, sometimes transforming into something completely different over time. You never really know what a game looked like during the initial stages of development, and The Last of Us Part 2 is a terrific example of that, as it's been revealed that Neil Druckmann originally had ideas for the game to be a large open world title inspired by Bloodborne.

This info was dropped in the recently released The Last of Us Part 2 documentary on YouTube, which gives fans of Naughty Dog an in-depth look at how the developer went about making the sequel and the challenges the team overcame. At the 17 minute and 45 second mark, a couple of developers explain that Neil Druckmann was "very ambitious" about making The Last of Us Part 2 as different to the original game as possible.

To do this, Naughty Dog apparently took a lot of inspiration from Bloodborne, especially the game's meaty melee combat and constantly expanding world. According to these devs, for the first four to five months of development, The Last of Us Part 2 was a Bloodborne-inspired open world title with a pure focus on melee combat.

In the first four or five months, the game was kind of an open world inspired by Bloodborne. It was purely melee-focused, like, it was all hand-to-hand combat.

They go on to explain that th layout structure of Bloodborne was also a very big influence on early development, as developers at Naughty Dog admired the "mastery over the world" and that feeling of familiarity you get when playing. Obviously, a lot of these ideas were dialed back, and the open world design didn't "work with the story" of The Last of Us Part 2, though you can still see elements of the initial design in the finished product.

It's not that surprising that Bloodborne influenced The Last of Us Part 2 in this way, with it being arguably one of the few generational titles that launched on the PS4 at the time. Bloodborne and Dark Souls have inspired hundreds, if not thousands, of games ever since they launched, and so one prestigious PlayStation game taking inspiration from another shouldn't be that surprising. Now, if only Bloodborne could take inspiration from The Last of Us and finally give us a remaster, that would be great.

The Last of Us Part 2 being inspired by Bloodborne wasn't even the biggest bombshell dropped during the entire documentary. That honor goes to Druckmann, who claimed right at the end that he feels the story of The Last of Us probably has "another chapter", which is as close to a confirmation of The Last of Us Part 3 as we're going to get.

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