In one of many fumbles for PlayStation this generation, the multiplayer component for The Last of Us: Part II got canned. And so, as is usually the case, gamers are here to salvage something from it.
PC modders are currently at work making a mode similar to The Last of Us’s Factions, featuring four-vs-four gameplay for the Steam version of TLOU2, and it’s coming together more and more by the day. A new update from the mod’s creator shows that it’s adding melee and special executions in its next patch.
Another clip that’s been going viral and brought the mod to my attention showcases a sweaty one-vs-one between players in a house on a match of Supply Raid, dueling each other with guns and melee and using the game’s listening feature to hear each other through walls. It looks awesome.
I don’t own TLOU2 on PC and probably won’t pick it up in the future, but this mod shows the level that players are willing to go when things don’t pan out, like the majority of the PS5 generation hasn’t.
The Last of Us Online was canceled back in 2023, according to its director Vinit Argawal, who said that the game was about 80 percent complete in an interview earlier this year. He blamed COVID-adjacent over-spending on the game’s cancelation.
“That [pandemic gaming] spending reduced, the economy also went down,” he explained. “And so, all that money that flooded into the game industry was not gonna be able to sustain because money’s getting pulled out, they had to also collapse the spending. They overspent, basically. They were overzealous. One of the casualties of that was this game I was directing.”
And so we get nothing, except for this mod. I’m of the mind that TLOU1’s Factions mode is one of the more underrated PlayStation multiplayer experiences. It included scavenging, crafting mid-round, teamwork, and multiple modes in a very unique experience that was supremely satisfying when it worked before pay-to-win microtransactions ruined it. We could have had something special. But instead, Sony chased the live-service dragon once again, and ended up canceling everything.
It pisses me off. The thrilling, often sweaty third-person gunplay in Factions was amazing. I wish we could’ve seen how Naughty Dog pulled it off in TLOU2. For now, this mod is the best we’ll get when it (tentatively) releases some time this month.
