Inside the Mind Behind the Brilliant New Last of Us DLC

Just when you thought you were over zombies, along came The Last of Us, last year’s genre-defying videogame about the post-apocalyptic trek of a man desnamed Joel and a young girl named Ellie. Now, after eight months of collecting award after award for the survival action title, developer Naughty Dog has opened another window into the world of clickers, stalkers and deadly fungi with a DLC experience called Left Behind. This time instead of playing as Joel, you step into a very different set of shoes: his companion Ellie, the scrappy 13-year-old girl who transformed over the course of the game from vulnerable child to bow-wielding badass.

Instead of focusing solely on the battle-hardened survivor Ellie became, however, Left Behind looks back at the girl she used to be back when she lived at a military school in Boston, and her relationship with her smartass best friend, Riley. The DLC draws heavily from the Last of Us prequel comic by the game’s creator, Neil Druckmann, and artist Faith Erin Hicks; WIRED spoke with the two about fleshing out Ellie and Riley’s world, why making faces in a photobooth can be as significant as demolishing a building, and what’s coming up next for The Last of Us.

[Interview condensed from different conversations with Druckmann and Hicks.]

Major spoilers for Left Behind follow. Play the game first, seriously.

WIRED: After reading The Last of Us: American Dreams comic, and talking to you and Faith last year about making it, I was taken aback at exactly much of the comic I saw in Left Behind. How influential was the comic and your collaboration with Faith on the DLC?

Druckmann: I feel like we would not have done the DLC without the comic book… It was hugely influential. [Riley's voice actor] Yaani King, and [Ellie's voice actor] Ashley Johnson both read the graphic novel in preparation for Left Behind as well. Everyone on the team had a copy of the graphic novel that they were constantly referencing. Whenever art would want to change something about the comic, they’d say, “let’s look at the comic, let’s make sure it has the same kind of feel.” We treat the comic as canon. If you read the comic, you’ll have a lot more insight into who these characters are and the journey they go on in the DLC, but it also stands on its own.

WIRED: The comic is also the first place we meet Riley. Was she a character you had in mind going in, or something that got developed during the process?

Druckmann: Riley’s characteristics and most of her dialogue came from Faith. It felt like a good way to split it, where Faith would own Riley and I would own Ellie.

Faith Erin Hicks: We knew it was going to be about Ellie and her relationship with a mentor figure, a woman a bit older than her, but physically [Riley's] design was left up to me. There was no direction given to me in that way, so I came up with her initial design. It was fun. I enjoyed writing her a lot. I like a little humor in my comics, even incredibly dark, post-apocalyptic ones. It was fun to give her these little one-off comments.

Last of Us: American Dreams/Faith Erin Hicks

WIRED: Although Left Behind flashes backward and forward in time between Ellie’s life before and after she meets Joel, I just realized that the entire DLC is teenage girls in malls. Granted, half of it involves ruthlessly killing enemies, and the other half is just two girls talking to each other and playing games, but still. What made you set Left Behind in the dystopian version of a traditional teenage hangout?

Neil Druckmann: When Faith and I were working on the comic we asked ourselves, what do teenagers do? They skip school, they go to the mall, they goof around. That was the inception of the comic book. Then talking about the game we thought, what would it be like to make those things interactive? It also show much how Ellie has changed between the more naïve, innocent Ellie and the hardened, survival Ellie that has been on this journey with Joel. It felt appropriate to put both of things in a mall, so that you can understand Ellie’s drawing her strength from this other event and remembering all these things that happened with Riley without having to say it. That became an intriguing narrative structure for the whole thing.

WIRED: At least half of the game was combat-free, and focused on these girls exploring both the mall and their relationship with each other. Why did you want to take a step back from combat and focus more on character and story?

Druckmann: Some of the parts we enjoyed making the most and the ones players reacted to were the quiet moments in The Last of Us. When we did The Last of Us, we felt we had way fewer combat encounters compared to Uncharted and other games we’d done in the past. We actually worried we’d get a backlash. But the opposite happened, and people either said it was just right or some reviewers said there was too much combat. We were like, ok, that’s interesting. So let’s see if we can go way past our comfort zone with this one and reduce the combat even more, which is a way gives it more weight and makes it more meaningful.

But it also presented this question of how you keep the player engaged. What sequences can we add that are interactive, that are building the relationship? That was the most challenging and rewarding stuff we did on Left Behind, things like the brick-throwing contest or the photobooth, which was a monstrosity of a task. It might seem like something small, but as far as resources go, [the photobooth] was just as difficult to do as a collapsing building in Uncharted 2. We took those resources and put them towards a more intimate, character-building moment.

You can choose these different goofy faces and it feels like you’re having fun with this other character. You’re bonding with her. There’s the Facebook bit there that we were amused by, that they would have no idea what Facebook is. And there’s that this kind of uncomfortable moment where we’re hinting at this other relationship that’s happening between the girls. That’s what we wanted to do with each set piece, to have them build on top of each other so that when you reach the climax you understand why they bonded in that way. We really enjoyed it and felt like if we were to play this sort of game we’d be surprised and excited by it, so we hope players feel the same way and they’re not bummed out that there’s not more combat.

WIRED: At one point Ellie and Riley visit a Halloween store, which is this fantastical version of the sort of nightmarish world where they live, and they don’t understand it any more than they understand Facebook.

Druckmann: Halloween, the concept of people dressing up as scary monsters for fun would be so weird for them, because for them everything is survival. They’re in this mall, which is sort of this museum of relics from the old world and just for a moment they get to escape into that world. Riley’s trying to get Ellie to ease up, forgive her, so they can go have fun. That’s what the moment where Ellie’s roaring in the werewolf mask signifies – now she’s ready to have fun. I think the animators hated us for the masks, because they had so many joints in them and it took them a lot of iterations to make that work.

WIRED: There were a lot of sequences in the mall that seem like more child-like or playful versions of the very dangerous things that Ellie confronts later in The Last of Us, like the brick-throwing contest or hunting each other with waterguns instead of real guns.

Druckmann: For us, it started as a very practical thing because we had all these mechanics that we’d trained the player [to use]. So how do we use those to have fun? When I was a teenager I did some horrible things like vandalizing a car, but at the time it was really fun. So I thought, vandalizing a car would be really fun, and we already have a brick-throwing mechanic. I don’t know how the watergun thing came up, but as soon as someone mentioned it, I said oh, of course. You can recreate that fight with David, but in a totally different context. We knew there would be contrast – that here I’m having fun and shooting water, but here I’m not having fun and I’m killing people to survive and save someone I love.

WIRED: During the brick-throwing contest you have the opportunity to make Riley answer a question, but even then she never really answers the question of why she left. Is that a question that has an answer?

Druckmann: It’s just one of those things, like when we had Bill talk with Joel about this [unexplained] favor that he owed him. If the characters explained it, it wouldn’t really feel natural. It’d feel like they were doing it for the viewer. To me what was necessary was that you understood that [Ellie and Riley] were really close and they had a falling out. Now, the nature of the falling out—I had discussions with the actors about what if there was a time where maybe they got a little intimate and Riley saw it as a way of giving up her dreams, so she lashed out. She took all her frustrations about not being able to join the Fireflies and find her purpose in this world and just lashed out at Ellie and disappeared. But again, it didn’t feel like we had to explain that in the DLC, that you could fill it in yourself. And whatever you fill in is fine; there’s no wrong answer to that.

WIRED: Throughout the game there’s also this looming feeling that things aren’t going to end well, at least if we remember Ellie’s backstory about getting bitten—this sense that it’s all going to get cut tragically short. There’s that moment when Ellie’s riding the carousel in the mall, but as soon as Riley jumps on it suddenly grinds to a halt. Is that a bit of foreshadowing?

Druckmann: We wanted that tension. How do you tell a story where people already know the ending and keep it interesting? There has to be enough revelation in the story to make it worthwhile. In telling this parallel story about Ellie’s bond with Riley and how it gives her strength, it gives you a different understanding of why Ellie fought so hard to save Joel. In one instance, she lost the person she loved and she’s willing to fight tooth and nail not to have it happen again. And that also parallels what happened to Joel, who lost someone he loved and over time grows to love Ellie and is willing to fight tooth and nail for her. When the carousel breaks, when the photobooth breaks, when they can’t get the picture—it’s all these fleeting moments that only exist in Ellie’s memory.

WIRED: There’s also that fantastic sequence with the broken videogame in the arcade, where they manage to find a way around the brokenness. They play it in their imaginations instead, almost like this sort of text adventure fighting game.

Druckmann: Or a radio drama. They have to use their imaginations, because this world doesn’t exist anymore. And it felt like this really cool gift that Riley can give Ellie. On her own maybe Ellie wouldn’t have done this, but with Riley’s help she can play a videogame. You align the player with Ellie and you have to fill in the gaps, you play the whole thing using sound.

WIRED: You’ve also got this more naïve, less battle-hardened version of Ellie playing a videogame with a badass character, Angel Knives, who’s killing people brutally. But then when you flashforward to her in the Colorado mall, all of a sudden Ellie is a badass videogame character who’s killing people brutally.

Druckmann: That was another conscious thing, where we describe the fatality that has to do with stabbing and killing. Here it’s fun and games, but then you’re flashing forward and you have to do these horrible things. It shows you how far the character has come.

WIRED: Faith, you created Angel Knives. Where did that idea come from?

Hicks: It was basically my dream Mortal Kombat character. I remember in early stages of the script, I’d thrown out the idea that maybe the video game they stumble on in the mall is Mortal Kombat. There’ve been some comments about The Last of Us being too violent, and I thought it’d be a funny joke. They pointed out to me that Mortal Kombat is obviously trademarked so we can’t use it in the comic, so I was given free rein to create a character from scratch, one that Riley would identify with. So I just created a character that I would like to see in a fighting game, this awesome badass lady with knives on her hands.

Last of Us: American Dreams/Faith Erin Hicks

WIRED: One of the big surprises is the kiss between Ellie and Riley. At what point in the process did this become an element of their relationship? Was it part of how you understood Ellie throughout the original game?

Druckmann: When you come up with a character you think about who they are, backstory. With Ellie, it’s just been a lingering thought, and I’ve had conversations with Ashley Johnson about the character. But everything was non-committal. We didn’t have to commit to anything because there aren’t any romantic storylines in The Last of Us. When I did interviews with Faith for the comic book, and we both made the mistake when we were describing Ellie and Riley for the first time – we said Ellie was attracted to Riley. We meant, I think, that she was just really drawn to her, that she really looked up to her. But then I thought in the back of my mind, what if there’s something more than that? It became this interesting dimension of their relationship that we could explore.

WIRED: The Last of Us was once criticized in a New York Times review as being a “video game made by men, for men and about men.” Here, Left Behind is not only a game about girls, but girls in love with each other, and strongly influenced by your collaboration with a woman. Is the diversity of characters in games something that you think about or that influenced the way you approached Left Behind?

Druckmann: Yes. As a team, as a company, our first priority is to entertain people, but for me personally – I have a daughter, and I was really moved by some of the Anita Sarkeesian videos that came out a couple years back. So on the one hand I really like the idea of creating these female protagonists, and in some ways I see Ellie and Riley as role models, as lame as that sounds. But on the other hand, it’s just a unique experience. You get to go into a post-apocalyptic world with zombie-like creatures, and see it through a different perspective, see it through someone else’s eyes. It’s something very unique to our medium, that by controlling a character you get to roleplay as that character. That’s what we wanted to explore in the DLC, to roleplay two teenagers and the bond that they form.

WIRED: It felt really shocking, almost, to be able to embody a character who felt this similar to me, or similar to my younger self. Isn’t that sort of a strange thing for a long-time gamer to say?

Druckmann: It’s kind of sad that there aren’t more experiences like it, but I know some of the reasons behind it. We’re very lucky at Naughty Dog that we get to make our own calls. No one outside of Naughty Dog tells us what to do. But I know when it comes to marketing or other aspects of the industry, those calls are sometimes very precedent-driven. So without being able to point to a game and say that can succeed on the market, you’re going to feel a lot of pressure to not do that. We’re lucky at Naughty Dog that we can ignore those recommendations, but in a lot of other studios, I’ve spoken with people in those studios and they cannot. So hopefully—and this is my personal thing, not a Naughty Dog agenda—in doing something like [Left Behind] in the triple-A space, we can help pave the way for other stuff.

WIRED: It’s kind of odd that introducing slightly more main characters that represent half of the human population could come across as an agenda, rather than a neutral or positive act.

Druckmann: The hope is that eventually someone’s gender or orientation will go by the wayside and it’ll be all about creating interesting characters. What does your story require? How do I tell something that’s never been told before? That’s all it should be about.

WIRED: The game ends with the two girls after they get bitten, but we don’t see the tragic situation that potentially takes place later when Riley starts turning and Ellie doesn’t. Instead, we end on this moment where they’ve made the decision to be together and ride it out to the end. Why did you choose that as the endpoint of the game?

Druckmann: There’s a book by David Mamet [where] he talks about how you try to enter a scene as late as possible so that the viewer is engaged and trying to fill in the backstory. And you leave as early as possible, so if there are things you don’t have to show, you don’t show them. This story, this arc, was about how Ellie leaves her childhood behind and becomes an adult. There is another story to tell there about what happens afterward, but in terms of this arc that was all we needed to tell and no more. You can fill it in yourself, or maybe one day I’ll team up with Faith and tell the rest of the story.

WIRED: So you think there are more stories to tell in this world?

Druckmann: I still have this script written, this story about Ellie’s mom [for] an animated short we were going to do, but it fell through. I’d love for that to see the light of day sometime, maybe as a DLC or a comic book. We’re brainstorming the next [Naughty Dog] project right now; some of the ideas are sequel ideas and some are brand-new IP. We’re just trying to see where our passions lie. Is there more to do here [in The Last of Us] both on a mechanical level or a narrative level, so we’re not repeating ourselves? Or is it this a good point to say goodbye to the characters in this world? It’s a very heavy decision, because whichever direction we go in commits us for the next three to four years. So we’re going to take several weeks to make that decision. Even if we do go to new IP, I’d still like an opportunity to revisit these characters and I’d love to have Faith come back and work with her again.