While we have no official word from Sony that The Last of Us 2 is coming, we’re fairly confident that Naughty Dog is already hard at work on a sequel to many gamers’ 2013 Game of the Year.
In a livestream of The Nathan Drake Collection in September, writer Josh Scherr slipped up, talking about work on the animation work in “all of the Uncharted games and the first The Last of Us.” This got the gaming industry abuzz, and whether or not it was a slip up (which we think it was) or not, we’d love to think about the future PlayStation lineup if The Last of Us 2 was included.
Should Sony actually announce The Last of Us 2 at PSX in a few short weeks (the event runs December 5th and 6th in San Francisco), it has the potential to really solidify PlayStation’s foothold on gaming in 2016 and well into 2017.
The company arguably has a lacklustre holiday season this year; their first-party lineup is virtually non-existent. But considering they have 16 huge games on the horizon (full, though by no means exhaustive list below), adding a sequel to the insanely well-received The Last of Us into the mix would do nothing but virtually guarantee Sony’s lock on 2016, and perhaps even 2017 in gaming.
We’re not expecting the game to release next year by any stretch; we’d peg The Last of Us 2 (or whatever it’s going to be called) to launch late in 2017. But knowing that the game will be shown off at E3 2016 would be a huge hype-builder for Sony, not to mention the fact that The Last Guardian and Horizon: Zero Dawn will also near certainly make an appearance at the June event.
We also know that even though Sony doesn’t have a ton of stuff to show off this year, they’ve made a habit of making some pretty big surprises in the past few months. At E3, they finally re-unveiled The Last Guardian and other showstoppers like Horizon: Zero Dawn and the Kickstarter unveiling of Shenmue III.
Following up at Paris Games Week in October, Quantic Dream unveiled Detroit: Become Human, Sony and Polyphony Digital announced Gran Truism Sport, and Hello Games announced No Man’s Sky release window of June 2016.
Not including The Last of Us 2, the list of major exclusive games Sony has coming out in 2016 so far include:
- Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End
- No Man’s Sky
- Abzu
- Attack on Titan
- Horizon: Zero Dawn
- Nier: Automata
- Persona 5
- Ratchet & Clank
- The Last Guardian
- Yakuza 6
- What Remains of Edith Finch
The 2017 list is a bit more sparse, but still includes some good exclusive gems:
- Dreams
- Gran Turismo Sport
- RIGS
- Detroit: Become Human
- WiLD
Somewhere between those two lists will also be PlayStation VR as well as a bunch of VR-exclusive launch titles for the peripheral. We’d also venture a guess that God of War will make an appearance in there somewhere, as will a new entry in either the Killzone or Infamous franchises; the last time we saw a game from either of the latter two series was late-2013 and early-2014, respectively.
Whew, Sony has a huge two years ahead of it. Imagine adding The Last of Us 2 to that list. Insane.