Watch the very first gameplay trailer for The Last of Us Part II

Ellie seems to be the main character

Sony showed a new trailer for The Last of Us II that features Ellie as a playable character in our first ever glimpse of gameplay for the title. The trailer begins with a cinematic featuring a younger, more innocent Ellie at a dance with her friends and a female romantic interest, presumably during a more peaceful time, but with unclear placement in the timeline of events beginning with the outbreak to the ending of the first game. Jumping years later, Ellie is shown to be a highly capable and deadly fighter. The trailer features the stealth elements that were a cornerstone of the first game, as well as a refined form of the brutal melee combat from the original.

The Last of Us Part II is one of the next big-budget, single-player-focused narrative games on the schedule for the PlayStation 4. Sony’s platform has had an absolutely stellar year of exclusives, specifically in that genre, including Horizon Zero Dawn and the new God of War. Sony-owned studio Naughty Dog is now tasked with delivering on immense expectations carried over from the original The Last of Us while pushing forward both the technical and narrative elements of the genre, just as the original did in the final years of the PlayStation 3.

We got the first trailer and the initial announcement for the game back at E3 in 2016. Last year during Paris Games Week, Naughty Dog made waves with an ultra-violent trailer that, despite some well-deserved backlash, did introduce a number of interesting new characters into The Last of Us universe. We know the game centers on Ellie who, now grown up and seemingly still immune to the Cordyceps brain infection, appears to be a much more hardened, almost nihilistic survivor. Joel, who made a controversial decision at the end of the first game that determined Ellie’s fate, is still in the picture, but to what extent we still don’t know.