In case you didn’t know, Naughty Dog released The Last of Us 2 Grounded II documentary as part of a title update to the game released yesterday. In it, Naughty Dog devs revealed that The Last of Us 2 was originally envisioned to be similar to FromSoftware’s Bloodborne. Yep, you read that right.

According to Co-Game Director Anthony Newman, “When we started making The Last of Us Part II, Neil (Druckmann) actually wanted to be very ambitious about changing the game almost entirely. In the first four or five months, the game was kind of an open world inspired by Bloodborne. And it was purely melee focused, like it was all hand-to-hand combat,”

It wasn’t just in the actual combat that the Bloodborne inspiration was being applied to, as Lead Game Designer Emilia Schatz also shared, “It wasn’t just the melee combat, we were also looking at the layout structure. Bloodborne had a very open space that kept getting bigger and bigger as you explored. I really like that feeling you get of mastery over the world. It starts to become almost a character in the game itself. And so, that was also something we were looking at.”

Thankfully, it looked like this massive shift for the franchise didn’t seem to work as intended, as Newman adds, “We started out making it as different as humanly possible from the first game as we could, and then kind of dialing it back. The open-world thing didn’t work with the story we were trying to tell.”

With how the first The Last of Us relied heavily on building tension through the narrative and offering a cohesive but linear path throughout the game, it would be a bit jarring to see its sequel remove those entirely and be a pure open-world experience. However, it would also be interesting to see how this would have taken shape.

Would you want Naughty Dog to shake things up for The Last of Us 3? Based on Neil Druckmann’s comments, it seems a trilogy is indeed in the cards, though don’t expect it to be released anytime soon.

For those interested, you can watch the Grounded II: Making The Last of Us Part II documentary below, with the Bloodborne chatter starting around the 17:00 mark.