As you may already know as a Naughty Dog fan, this Saturday, September 26 is "Outbreak Day" where we usually see a host of limited edition art, delicious looking merch, and special TLOU PS4 themes. For the past seven years, the makers of The Last of Us Part 2 has held this special event to mark when the Cordyceps Brain Infection reached critical mass that started the game off. However, due to COVID-19, Naughty Dog felt that it wasn't a suitable name and instead renamed the day to "The Last of Us Day" which is, of course, a lot more empathetic to the current crisis we globally face. Staying on The Last of Us bandwagon, some images of Dina from Part 2 has cropped up showcasing what she looked like in the early stages of development.

Alexandria Neonakis, a character concept artist at Naughty Dog, tweeted out some early illustrations of what Dina looked like before her final makeover for The Last of Us Part 2. As you can see from the images at the top of the picture, these drawings were prior to Cascina Caradonna being cast as a face model for Dina. When asked if she was just given a rough description of the type of face they were looking for until they found Cascina, Alexandria stated that "Early on was fairly rough, we had like some general direction though. In the veeery early days it was just do whatever you want but I wasn’t working on her yet then". Later on, as you can tell from the image at the bottom, we can see Cascina's face start to take form and develop into who we know as Dina today.

Alexandria who is originally from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, moved to Los Angeles to work with Naughty Dog in games such as Uncharted Lost Legacy, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us, its DLC Left Behind and of course, The Last of Us Part 2. Being a multitalented artist, Alexandria also does illustrations for children's books that include Sweetest Kulu, written by Celina Kalluk, and This is MY Room! written by Jennifer Jacobson. You can check out all of Alexandria's artwork over on her official website that includes some incredible pieces from The Last of Us Part 2, Drake's journal from Uncharted 4, personal illustrations and digital also. She's a fantastic artist who I've personally followed over the years so I hope you can appreciate her work as much as I have. You can also follow Alexandria over on Twitter and Instagram.

As we await for "The Last of Us Day", I'm hopeful that we get some information on the multiplayer mode, Factions. In August, we saw some rumored multiplayer gameplay footage that had leaked but whether the footage is genuine or not, we will hopefully get to see if that's the case when Naughty Dog decides to announce when we can get our hands on it or at the very least, a trailer. The Last of Us Part 2 is available now exclusively on PS4 (and soon to be PS5). The game was one of DualShockers’ favorites of 2020; make sure to check out the official DualShockers (generally spoiler-free) review. Also, feel free to grab the game physically on Amazon to help support the site.