'The Last of Us Part II' Leaks: Does Joel die at Abby's hands in the PlayStation 4 game all are waiting for?
Spoilers for ‘Last of Us Part II'
The internet right now is a minefield of spoilers for the sequel to the Naughty Dog PlayStation 4 game ‘The Last of Us’. According to reports, early on Monday morning, April 27, videos of important cutscenes, gameplay, and the game's main menu were posted online. While the original video has been removed from YouTube, several other copies have since popped up. From Reddit to Twitter to YouTube, there are spoilers for the coveted game everywhere right now.
News reports claim that the footage of the PS4 game was allegedly uploaded by a disgruntled Naughty Dog employee over a payment issue, but that has not been confirmed. The leak's authenticity hasn't been confirmed by Sony or Naughty Dog.
2013’s ‘The Last of Us’ was a groundbreaking video game that followed Joel and Ellie as they traveled across a post-apocalyptic version of the US overrun by fungus-infected and usually cannibalistic creatures. Part 2 is set five years after the events of ‘The Last of Us’, and follows Ellie, who comes into conflict with a mysterious cult in the post-apocalyptic United States.
At present, ResetEra has a live thread of all the leaks that are being updated in real-time. The major leaks are as follows:
For the first half of the game, players control Ellie. That changes in the second half, when the controls switch to Abby, a character featured in the Paris Game Week 2017 trailer. The character is reportedly played by Laura Bailey. In terms of story, one of the biggest leaks is that Dina is pregnant with Jesse's baby. Dina is supposedly the woman who was seen in a 2018 cutscene released at the Sony E3 Conference. The cutscene showed Dina and Ellie kissing each other.
Perhaps the biggest plot leak of all is that Joel dies at the hands of Abby. The ResetEra thread said, “There's a scene early on in the game where Joel gets his skull caved in by Abby with a golf club. Later on, a scene between Ellie and Dina takes place where Dina explicitly mentions Joel and Jesse being dead.”
An unconfirmed leak in the same thread suggests that both Joel and Ellie die in the course of the game. The leak reads: “Joel is killed in the first few hours by Abby, the daughter of the surgeon you kill in Part One. This is apparently what happens in that scene in the trailer where Ellie's being held down. Ellie dies at the end of the story, but he wasn't told how. Jesse and Dina live. You play as Abby for half the game.” Even if unconfirmed, it sounds likely given all the confirmed leaks.
The result of such massive leaks being out in the open is that gamers, who have long been waiting for the sequel, are talking about canceling their pre-orders. And while many on Twitter and Reddit and other gaming messaging boards are claiming that they no longer want to play the game in light of such spoilers, studies have shown that spoilers can actually improve the experience for many.
A 2011 study conducted by Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt of UC San Diego suggests that spoilers can actually increase our enjoyment of literature.
‘The Last of Us Part II’ was confirmed in December 2016 and, following a preview event last September, originally scheduled to come out in February this year. The release date was shuffled back to May and then delayed indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic. A Sony update on April 27, after the leak (though it makes no mention of the leak at all), announced that ‘The Last of Us Part II’ will arrive on June 19.