A reader anticipates that The Last Of Us multiplayer will be a live service title, and laments the fact that the original was even turned into a franchise.
Summer Game Fest on Thursday, I believe it’s fair to say, was not a tremendously exciting display. That wasn’t due to any fault of the organizers, but rather to the fact that there isn’t much going on in games right now as the pandemic’s delayed effects begin to bite. I’m willing to guess that the Xbox showcase will be similar, with independent games remaining the most intriguing aspect of both events.
I expect Sony will skip having one and instead wait a month or two until they have more to offer, which is why The Last Of Us remake was left to be revealed at Summer Game Fest.
The only item that was genuinely surprising was a piece of concept art for the multiplayer spin-off, which was a bit of a nightmare because knowledge of it managed to get out early, via Sony’s own website.
They never specified what the spin-off is or gave it a name, but I believe the answer is obvious: it’s a live service game and one of the ten Sony promises it’ll release in the next several years.
Some insiders are already predicting this, but it’s self-evident if you think about it. Nobody is going to spend £70 for a multiplayer game based on The Last Of Us, but what about a free-to-play game with microtransactions? That, I’m afraid to say, has a chance.
It’s pointless for me to rail against live service games. I despise them to my core (interested? I despise the phrase “hardcore,” but it doesn’t matter because they aren’t the ones who spend the majority of their money on them.
When Sony announced they were building their own, I assumed it would be a collection of battle royale clones and Smash Bros. clones.
That’ll most likely be a part of it, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me that they’d advertise them through their existing brands. The Last Of Us felt too ‘classy’ to be converted into this terrible microtransaction-filled pay-to-win game, for lack of a better description, and yet here we are.
I despise the idea of God of War becoming a Genshin Impact clone or Horizon being a looter shooter, but it appears that’s where we’re headed. I’m not suggesting they’ll stop making’real’ games; they won’t, but they’re in risk of becoming nothing more than a platform for more lucrative live-service games.
With The Last Of Us, in especially, I wish it had been a one-and-done experience. As many speculated at the time of the sequel’s announcement, the ideal situation would have been for Naughty Dog to use The Last Of Us as a springboard for a ‘Naughty Dog presents…’ franchise, where each game is unique but, because they’re all from a trusted developer, they’re essentially sequels in the sense that Sony can count on people rushing to buy the next one.
However, they did not do so. They developed a sequel that, although excellent, stretched credulity in terms of scenario and characters and would have worked much better as a standalone game.
The zombies were barely present and had no bearing on the plot, whereas the two main heroes were shown as unstoppable killing machines.
The same theme, about the never-ending cycle of retribution and hatred, would have been better served by a completely new game and cast of characters, but Naughty Dog had to cram it into an existing series. And now there will be a live service game as well.
Naughty Dog had the chance to escape the cycle of endless sequels, but they squandered it. As a result, I’m confident that a more implausible The Last Of Us Part 3 is already in the works, in which Ellie is miraculously redeemed despite having gone well past the point of no return only a few hours into the last game.
Of course, the battle against unending sequels is an old story, but it’s such a tragedy that nothing, including movies, games, and television, can just stop. The only thing that ever stops them is commercial collapse (I’m glad the Terminator series is finally dead), so image how many decades Star Wars will be dragged through the ignominy of low-budget, low-effort TV shows before it is finally allowed to die.
And now The Last Of Us finds itself in a similar situation. It shouldn’t be, and it certainly shouldn’t be a franchise, but that isn’t the reality of our world.
By reader Brutus