Neil Druckmann has confirmed that new The Last of Us games are officially in development, keeping the franchise alive well past the HBO show's final season. Collider got the scoop, and it lines up with what he's been hinting at for years: this story isn't finished, even if the TV adaptation is heading toward its ending.

I've been with this series since the original dropped in June 2013, and I still remember finishing it around two in the morning, sitting there through the credits, genuinely unsure whether what Joel did was heroic or monstrous. That ambiguity was the whole point. It was the rare game that trusted you to sit with an uncomfortable ending instead of spelling out a moral for you.

Then Part II arrived in 2020 and did something riskier, splitting the narrative and forcing players through a perspective they didn't want. People are still arguing about that game, which in my book beats everyone shrugging and moving on. Say what you want about the pacing or the structure, but Druckmann's team made a game about revenge where you felt worse the more revenge you got. That's craft, even when it hurts.

The timing is what's interesting here. The HBO series is heading into its final season, and Druckmann's confirmation suggests Naughty Dog sees life in the franchise beyond adaptations. Why wouldn't they? The games have been enormous sellers for Sony for over a decade and the show has kept this world in front of a massive audience for years. The appetite hasn't dried up.

The obvious question is what a new game even looks like. Part II wrapped its central story about as tightly as anything in this medium ever has. A direct continuation with Ellie and Joel is off the table for reasons anyone who finished the second game understands. So you're looking at either a new cast in the same world, a story set in the gaps between games, or something set decades removed. Druckmann has also shown he's willing to let a setting breathe, from the Seattle aquarium to the Santa Barbara finale. There's a whole collapsed country out there and we've only walked through slices of it.

My bet is a new region and new characters, with the cordyceps world as connective tissue. That's basically what the show's been doing with its standalone episodes, and it works. The franchise has already proven it can tell a self-contained story here without dragging the main cast back onstage.

Whatever's next also comes with real weight behind it. When the person steering the franchise confirms sequels publicly, actual development resources are committed, not a napkin sketch. Naughty Dog isn't a studio that announces things offhand, and this confirmation follows years of Druckmann dropping hints that he wasn't done with this world.

For a guy who's covered this franchise since the opening scene gutted me on a PS3, I'll admit some fatigue risk. The IP machine can grind even great worlds into paste, and we've all watched publishers squeeze a beloved property one entry too many. But Druckmann has earned the benefit of the doubt twice now. Both mainline games took real swings when safer options existed.

Third time's the test. Have you gone back and replayed the original lately? It still holds up scary well. Whatever comes next has a brutal standard to clear, and I'd rather Naughty Dog swing again than play it safe. That's always been how that studio operates.