No Return was more of an organizational challenge than any, as it required us to know exactly what content we had gotten on the original The Last of Us Part II (2020) game and where we could reuse it. Because the budget for this remaster was small, we had decided to support this feature with no additional recordings. This meant that we had to support 8 new player characters with the same assets we had shipped the original game with, forcing us to get creative as a team.

My role on this feature was to handle the implementation of the efforts for the new player characters, meaning that I had to take the efforts that were already edited for the original game and see what player events could be filled out with them. Luckily, though, I was not alone on this task, since I was fortunate enough to get the support of the person who originally edited most of those efforts. Together, we were able to support the efforts side of this feature - reusing existing content where it was possible and editing new assets when none of the original ones seemed to work.

In hindsight, the hardest events were definitely the detailed deaths, as we had only recorded a small number of deaths for buddies on the original game. As for the hardest characters, though, that award would go to Joel and Tommy, since neither of them are buddy characters in the original game (for reasons that I won’t go into).