HBO’s The Last of Us had to speed up Abby’s reveal

In The Last of Us Part II, it takes a long time before players understand just who Abby is. A new character introduced as both an antagonist and protagonist, Abby is locked in a violent game of revenge with Ellie, but her reasoning and history don’t become clear until around midway through the game, when players actually take control of her as a character.

When the team behind the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us started thinking about introducing her for the show’s second season, they realized they didn’t have that same amount of time.

“When we put out The Last of Us Part II, you have the entire story and you decide how you want to pace it out,” co-creator Neil Druckmann, who was also the writer and director on both games, tells The Verge. “Here we’re putting out episodes week by week, which are roughly an hour long. If we were to wait as much as we did in the game to reveal certain things, our viewers might have to wait a very, very long time — longer than we were comfortable with.”

That means parts of her story were moved up. In the premiere episode of season 2, it’s a lot clearer from the start why Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) has tracked down Joel (Pedro Pascal …

Read the full story at The Verge.