After years of anticipation, The Last of Us Part 2 released last month. With it brought a lot of critical acclaim, but also a lot of polarizing discussion that often brought out tensions between fanbases, as well as critics and developers. But regardless of all that, the game was a blockbuster with a capital B with a staggering amount of work that went into it. It was detailed earlier that over 2,000 developers ultimately worked on the game, but now we get a little behind the scenes look at just how much work went into a single section.
The museum level in the game was one that many remember fondly, largely as it’s the biggest callback to the original game. On a recent episode of Game Maker’s Toolkit, Level Designer Evan Hill revealed that it took about two full years of work to make that level. He breaks down how it was done, and some of Naughty Dogs process in refining how these things, revealing that some levels in the game were redone up to 25 different times.
“Pretty much two solid years,” says Hill. “Pretty much the big secret for all Naughty Dog level design is just iteration and work. We have some fundamentals but there were some levels in this game that were redone about 25 times.”
Hill also goes in the actual timeline of how the level was crafted, so it’s worth the watch. The Last of Us Part 2 released on the PlayStation 4, and was a big success financially, so thankfully that level of time and craft was rewarded.
