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You know how the old adage goes: if a job’s worth doing, bloody well do it yourself.
Feature creep appeared to kill Naughty Dog’s own live service The Last of Us multiplayer game, which by all accounts was amazing and almost finished, so now a talented modder has taken it upon himself to make his own version.
This, built on the foundations of The Last of Us 2’s PC port, is much more akin to the original Factions, so don’t expect any fancy narrative elements here.
It takes character models from the main game, drops them into maps based on locations from the campaign, and sees them duke it out to the death.
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I honestly have no idea why the California studio couldn’t also make something like this, because I think at the end of the day all anyone wanted out of the new Factions was The Last of Us 2’s superior gameplay adapted into a competitive online environment.
This mod has only been in development since January so does look a little rough around the edges, but it’ll apparently be finished by September. Obviously you won’t be able to play this on the PS5, so you’ll need a copy of the game on PC to play it.
Seeing this in motion is a reminder of what could have been, and honestly it makes me feel like Naughty Dog really dropped the ball. I understand we don’t know the full story of what happened to its own standalone multiplayer game, but I think most fans would have been satisfied with a more polished version of this.
Instead, we’re still waiting for the studio’s first original PS5 game of the generation – and it looks like we’re never going to get another official The Last of Us multiplayer game at this point. What a missed opportunity!