Naughty Dog’s Grounded II documentary reveals that their latest game, The Last of Us 2, was about to become an open-world title following the example of another Sony game, Bloodborne.
For Grounded 2, co-director Anthony Newman said the game took some aspects from Bloodborne, a PlayStation 4 exclusive title released in 2015.
He revealed that in the beginning:
“The game was an open world inspired by Bloodborne.”
The game’s layout was initially designed to mimic a map that grew with exploration. Naughty Dog liked FromSoftware’s style, but the team ended up abandoning that focus later. The open-world levels didn’t work for a linear game like The Last of Us Part 2. However, the game did retain some semi-open-world stages at one point. He also said:
“Our entire focus was on melee combat, following the example of the game itself.”
This is another aspect that Naughty Dog abandoned, and decided to add firearms to the game, but we cannot deny that hand-to-hand combat received major and influential improvements in the second part of the survival game.
