Naughty Dog may be setting the bar higher for other developers to follow in the future.

While we’re still a month away from the game’s release (it’s coming to PlayStation 5 on January 19, but the embargo will be lifted a few days before that, so there will be plenty of reviews), The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered isn’t in our hands just yet. Sony could have done away with the PlayStation 5 version by releasing a performance patch for the PlayStation 4 version, but they chose not to. The remastered version doesn’t change much in terms of story (completeness and the way it’s presented is not a negative in the original game), so the extra content could make the re-release interesting.

A new roguelike mode, a speedrun mode, lost levels (Boar Hunt, Jackson Party, Sewers) and visual tuning are the extras. But the most important innovation will be the developer commentary. This is something you find on DVDs in home editions of movies (nowadays more on Blu-ray), giving you transparency along with explanations of why things look the way they do and why they happen. Cut scenes and bloopers are also rare in the games, but the franchise has taken a fairly cinematic direction, so it feels natural to expand on them.

More than two thousand people worked on The Last of Us 2, but the storytelling and pacing of franchise co-creator Neil Druckmann is unique, and it may be a logical choice to use developer commentary. The commentary and cutscenes show how he and Craig Mazin can shape the story in the way we see in the second season of the HBO series The Last of Us. And the commentary could be followed by other developers (e.g. Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, or Tim Schafer) because we’d be curious to see how they approach certain content elements or story execution in their games.

The rest is up to the gaming industry.

Source: GameRant