The Last Of Us Part 3 in production, says insider

The Last of Us Part III is in active production at Naughty Dog, according to a leaker who was waiting for a screener to watch the upcoming HBO show.

Like the ancient antics of Pan, leakers are a mercurial lot. This one, who is called Viewer Anon, got bored waiting for a link to be supplied to them so they could see the show starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. "It's not blackmail, I'd just be too busy watching to tweet," justified Viewer Anon, before claiming that Neil Druckmann and the Naughty Dog team are working on the next The Last of Us game. Really, it's not an actual shocker, since the series is one of the most critically and commercially successful examples in the industry.

Here's the trailer for the HBO show:

"With the first game there were no expectations and it was like we could do anything," said director Neil Druckmann in an interview in 2020. "Finding [the emotional motivator] with the sequel was much harder than it was with the first game, and going forward it would be exponentially harder to justify going back to that world and finding a way to vary things up. There’s already so many things you’ve seen about the backstory, about how the outbreak happens, so we’d really have to figure out how to create a new experience that matches the emotional impact of these stories and I don’t know what that is."

From that description, the potential plotlines that The Last of Us Part III could follow seems to shrink significantly. The games, and I'm including Left Behind in this statement, always connect to one of the characters of the core series. Most obviously, the choice for a playable protagonist would be Lev as Ellie's journey of white-hot revenge is over.

But, we could see another hefty time skip, as the stories are wont to do, with JJ as a playable character. This would also allow the writers a lot of wiggle room with how the world might have changed again over the course of a decade or so. In any event, we'll have to wait for some sort of confirmation from Naughty Dog before we run ragged with possibilities.