A reader predicts that The Last Of Us multiplayer game will be a live service title and regrets that the original ever became a franchise.
I think it’s fair to say that on Thursday was not a particularly exciting showcase. That wasn’t any fault of the organisers, but merely a reflection that there isn’t much going on in games at the moment, as the delayed effects of the pandemic begin to bite. I’m willing to bet the showcase will be much the same and that indie games will remain the most interesting thing at both events.
I suspect that Sony won’t even bother having one and will instead wait a month or two until they have more to show, and that’s why they left to be shown at Summer Game Fest. That was all a bit of a mess though because news of it managed to leak out early, via Sony’s own website, so the only thing that was actually a surprise was a piece of concept art for the multiplayer spin-off.
They never said what the spin-off is, they didn’t even give it a name, but I think it’s fairly obvious: it’s a live service game and one of over the next few years. Some insiders are already suggesting exactly that but it’s already obvious if you think about it. Nobody’s going to be interested in paying £70 for a multiplayer game based on The Last Of Us but a free-to-play game stuffed full of microtransactions? That, I hate to admit, does have a chance.
There’s no point me ranting against live service games. I hate them, most core (keen? I hate the term hardcore) gamers do, but it doesn’t matter because they aren’t the people that spend all the money on them. But when Sony said they were making their own ones I foolishly thought it’d be the usual collection of battle royale wannabes and Smash Bros. clones.
That probably will be part of it but for some reason it didn’t occur to me that they’d be using their existing franchises to promote them. For want of a better word, The Last Of Us seemed too ‘classy’ to be turned into some horrible microtransaction filled pay-to-win game, and yet here we are.
I dread to think of God Of War being turned into a Genshin Impact clone or Horizon becoming a looter shooter but that seems to be path we’re heading down. I’m not saying they’ll stop making the ‘real’ games, of course they won’t, but they’re in danger of becoming merely the foundation for more lucrative live service games.
With The Last Of Us in particular, I just wish it had been one game and that’s it. As many said at the time of the sequel’s announcement, the ideal thing would’ve been if Naughty Dog had turned The Last Of Us into an opportunity to create a ‘Naughty Dog presents…’ franchise, where every game is different but because they’re all by a developer you trust they’re essentially still sequels, in the sense that Sony can rely on people rushing to buy the next one.
They didn’t do that though. They made a sequel that, while very good, strained credulity in terms of the setting and characters and really would’ve worked much better as a completely different game. The zombies were barely in the game, and had nothing to do with the plot, and the two main characters were portrayed as indestructible killing machines.
The same story, about the never-ending cycle of revenge and hate, would’ve been much better served by a completely new game and cast of characters, but instead the story Naughty Dog wanted to tell had to be shoehorned into an existing franchise. And now a live service game is going to be as well.
Naughty Dog had the opportunity to break from the cycle of constant sequels but ignored it. As a result, I’m sure an even more implausible The Last Of Us Part 3 is already in the planning stages, where Ellie is magically redeemed despite going well past the point of no return only a few hours into the last game.
It’s an old story of course, the battle against endless sequels, but it’s such as shame that nothing, including movies, games, and TV can just end and that’s it. The only thing that ever stops them is financial failure (I’m so relieved the Terminator franchise is finally dead) so just imagine how many decades Star Wars has to be dragged through the ignominy of low budget, low effort TV shows before it’s finally allowed to die.
And now The Last Of Us is in the same position. It shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t even be a franchise, but unfortunately that’s not the reality of the world we live in.
By reader Brutus
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