The Last of Us: all the news about the video game franchise turned TV series

Kaitlyn Dever will officially take on the role of Abby in the highly anticipated second season of The Last of Us, HBO announced on Tuesday.

Rumors about Dever’s role as Abby in the video game adaptation began circulating late last year. Abby is one of the major characters in The Last of Us Part II, the PlayStation game from which the second season will draw its story, and is a rival to protagonist Ellie (played by Bella Ramsey).

Naughty Dog announced Thursday that it’s canceled the multiplayer game it was building in The Last of Us universe.

The studio says it has been in pre-production on The Last of Us Online even while working on The Last of Us Part II. “We were enthusiastic about the direction in which we were headed,” according to a blog post about the news.

Naughty Dog officially announced The Last of Us Part II Remastered for PS5 on Friday evening following a bunch of leaks about the game earlier in the day. The game will be released on January 19th, 2024 — just like the leaks said.

The biggest new addition seems to be a “roguelike survival mode” called No Return that’s “designed to let players prove their mettle in randomized encounters and experience The Last of Us Part II’s combat in a fresh experience,” Naughty Dog’s Jonathon Dornbush said in the announcement blog post. You’ll be able to play as some new characters and work through “various stealth and combat encounters that will pit you against a range of enemies, with unique twists that can add new, unexpected factors to any given encounter.”

We might be waiting a while for more of HBO’s The Last of Us. HBO announced in January that a second season of the excellent adaptation was in the works, and on Thursday, HBO and Max content chief Casey Bloys said that the season will enter production in early 2024, according to Variety.

Bloys said that production was delayed because of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes (the latter of which is still going on). The show also wasn’t on HBO’s slate for 2024, Variety says, meaning it might not come out until 2025 at the earliest.

The Last of Us Part I arrived on PC this March as an embarrassing, broken PC port of a game, even on high-end machines. When I tried it on my Steam Deck handheld, the game was utterly unplayable — despite co-creator Neil Druckmann’s assurances that the game would “grace” the Steam Deck.

But after 11 patches, I can finally confirm The Last of Us is completely playable on Valve’s portable PC.

Naughty Dog’s got a new single-player game in the works.

The Uncharted developer was expected to show off its The Last Of Us multiplayer project at this week’s PlayStation Showcase. It didn’t, but on Friday, it did share some news about the game as well as a surprise announcement that it’s working on a totally new game.

Naughty Dog and Nvidia have released more hotfixes for The Last of Us Part I’s PC port in an attempt to fix various crashes and other bugs that have plagued the game since it launched a week ago. Nvidia says its hotfix driver Version 531.58 is meant to make the game more stable when running on RTX 30-series graphics cards, and in the patch notes for v1.0.1.7 of the game, Naughty Dog says it and co-developer Iron Galaxy are “closely watching player reports to support future improvements and patches.”

The changelog also mentions improvements beyond just fixing various crashes. Resetting the graphics options to default should now work, an issue where the game wouldn’t read Xbox controller stick inputs properly has been fixed, and there are new features to help make it easier for the developers to diagnose issues. If the game crashes due to a GPU issue, you’ll have the option of “additional GPU diagnostic tooling” for your next play session.

The Last of Us Part I on PC hasn’t had a smooth launch. PC players have reported crashes, performance issues, and plenty of weird visual glitches. Now, Sony-owned developer Naughty Dog has started issuing bug fixes to try and fix some of the widespread problems and investigate other bugs that are affecting PC players.

A new patch arrived on Steam and the Epic Games Store last night, which includes fixes for “several performance & hitch related issues impacting some users.” It’s not clear exactly what has been fixed, and for some players, it was only a 36MB patch on Steam.

I was expecting to write about how The Last of Us Part I arriving on PC is the latest example of a great PC port of a Sony PlayStation title. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The Last of Us Part I arrived on PC yesterday and players aren’t happy. Out of more than 9,000 reviews in the Steam store, 67 percent are negative.

PC players are reporting issues that range from random crashes and stuttering, all the way up to long shader compilation times and characters randomly becoming dripping wet in cut scenes. The game also appears to be poorly optimized, taking up large amounts of VRAM on systems and dropping frames. I’ve personally experienced crashes and random frame rate drops on my own test system, which is a top-end gaming PC equipped with an RTX 4090.

The first season of HBO’s The Last of Us is over — and there’s a lot to dig into. Between the show’s heavy themes, its long-controversial ending, the way it changed and adapted the game, as well as the games themselves, we’ve got plenty of different stories to read after the finale. They span the last 10 years, from the onset of the original PS3 game all the way up to the TV show’s season 1 finale. Here are reviews, interviews, deep dives, and more to explore while we wait to see Ellie and Joel hanging out in the post-apocalypse once again.

The infected were a constant threat throughout the first season of HBO’s The Last of Us, but compared to the game, the show didn’t ultimately feature quite as many different kinds of cordyceps-infected monsters as Joel and Ellie made their way to Salt Lake City. Aside from one rather melodramatic bloater, small hordes of clickers (and other humans) were really the only dangers The Last of Us’ human survivors seemingly had to worry about. But according to showrunner Craig Mazin and series co-creator Neil Druckmann, there’s a reason for that, and it may very well change as The Last of Us continues in future seasons.

During a recent junket interview ahead of last night’s finale, Mazin and Druckmann spoke at length about their adaptation process and how they decided which elements of gameplay were absolutely essential to the story’s narrative. The Last of Us being based on a postapocalyptic survival game meant that Joel’s story in the show would obviously be marked by violence reminiscent of the source material. 

Well, after nine weeks of enduring and surviving, the first season of HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us is finally over. If this was your first exposure to the cordyceps apocalypse, you might be thinking now is the time to get into the games: but where to start? The obvious answer is with the original The Last of Us, which just got a nice, shiny remake for the PS5 (and soon PC). But the ideal starting point is actually something smaller and more intimate: a standalone expansion called Left Behind.

The following includes spoilers for The Last of Us: the game, the show, the sequel — all of it.

While HBO’s The Last of Us brought quite a few of the original video game’s actors back for cameo roles throughout the first season, the show was always careful not to draw too much attention to them so as not to pull focus from the larger story being told. But for its season 1 finale, The Last of Us pulled out one of the bigger guns for a tense and moving scene. It’s a moment that series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann wanted to capture the ethos of the entire series.

Heads up, this post contains spoilers for The Last of Us’ season 1 finale.

In HBO’s The Last of Us, it’s spore-spreading mutants rather than flesh-eating zombies that plague the survivors fighting desperately to stay alive in an apocalyptic future. But uninfected humans do have reason to be concerned about being hunted down and eaten. Episode 8, “When We Are in Need” from writer Craig Mazin and director Ali Abbasi, lays bare in brutal detail just what makes living out in The Last of Us’ infected and infested wilderness so dangerous — even in winter months when the fungal monsters aren’t an immediate threat.

With Joel (Pedro Pascal) still wounded and in need of medical attention as “When We Are in Need” opens, it almost seems like a godsend when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) first encounters a preacher named David (Scott Shepherd) and his right-hand man James (Troy Baker) who insist that they can help keep her safe. But as Ellie gets to know the pair and how they’ve been managing to survive with their small group of fellow believers out in the woods, the encounter becomes one of The Last of Us’ most nightmarish chapters that highlights how people have lost part of their humanity.

Watching episode 6 of The Last of Us, I was filled with dread. I’d played the game years ago (despite a very rational and healthy fear of all things zombie), and I knew where this episode was headed and what kind of fights Joel and Ellie would be forced into. But then the show didn’t spend hours in one location as Joel and Ellie snuck around trying to avoid getting murdered and doing a little murdering of their own. Instead, the episode moved breezily along and got right to the good stuff — which, in video games, usually means the cutscenes.

This article contains spoilers for the first six episodes of The Last of Us.

The huge success of The Last of Us’ HBO series has seemingly led to a big sales bump for the newly released remaster of the first TLOU game. According to a new report from the NPD Group, The Last of Us: Part I jumped from number 36 on its best-seller chart in December to number 11 in January, the month the series premiered.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt saw its own boost in popularity following the release of Netflix’s The Witcher series in 2019, while Cyberpunk 2077 jumped up Steam’s charts after Cyberpunk: Edgerunners came out in September. But for The Last of Us, Sony had almost definitely been preparing for a rise in interest in the series due to the show, so I’m guessing it’s not too surprising to see that the game is selling more.