Naughty Dog unveiled a new gameplay trailer for The Last of Us Part II during E3 2018 and it got tongues a-wagging.

For a start, as well as some truly brutal takedowns, it featured a brief, throwaway mention of someone referred to as "the old man". And that has set the Twitterverse alight. Could the old man in question be Joel?

Well, we can reveal that it absolutely, 100 per cent is, indeed, Joel. And we can also reveal that he is alive and will be a major character in the sequel, as confirmed to us by a senior lead at Naughty Dog itself.

The developer has concentrated on Ellie in the latest trailer, plus a couple of new characters that will be important in the game, but the next will likely feature Joel.

We also found out that there will be plenty of The Infected in the new game, even though we've only had one brief glimpse of Clickers so far. We were told that there will even be three new classes of Infected, to join Runners, Clickers and Bloaters in providing night terrors.

The final piece of information about The Last of Us 2 we managed to glean during E3 2018 is that playable characters gain a new ability to go completely prone at any time.

This is evidenced in the trailer when Ellie crawls under a car. This is a playable aspect and not a quick time effect as previously suggest.