8 Scrapped Endings That Almost Ruined Great Video Games

2. Ellie And Joel Live Happily Ever After - The Last Of Us

The Last of Us is a game that famously only properly came together during its final months, with so much of the story changing throughout development. In fact, the original pitch from Neil Druckmann that Sony greenlit resembled virtually nothing from the finished product.

Initially, the idea was to have Tess - who dies early in the main game - become the villain. Feeling betrayed by Joel, she would propel the two protagonists around the country, eventually catching up to them at the end. Here, the game was going to close out on Joel being tortured by Tess, and then Ellie intervening and killing her.

In this version, Tess would have been Ellie's first kill, but according to Druckmann, "We decided it wasn't going to be about the first time she killed someone, it was more about this coming of age story of the impact that the horrors of violence has on her over the course of the game."

Even when that was changed though, the new ending still wasn't good enough. After the hospital scene from the final draft, the epic would have ended on the two moving to a society in San Francisco and helping rebuild civilisation, with Ellie buying into Joel's lie.

The director described the ending as not being honest enough, and altered it to be more ambiguous and less hopeful.