Along with officially announcing The Last of Us Part 1, Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann shared some concept art from the heavily rumoured standalone multiplayer game. During a recent watch-along stream, Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb provided more details on the same (at 2:02:05).
“They’re making a standalone multiplayer game that is not Factions. It’s gonna be very, very live service-y. They’re building all the services in so they can, like, swap in huge parts of it, in and out. Like, that’s what they’ve been working on and trying to make it bigger and bigger and more ambitious.”
Around the 2:14:00 mark, Grubb said that it seems like this will be one of the 10 live service titles that Sony previously confirmed to be in the works. As for the fate of Factions, he said, “The reason this isn’t just Factions…for one, they wanted to make it more ambitious. Make it more of its own thing. But then also, they wanted to spend a lot of time building out the specific technology so that they could do a live service game in a Naughty Dog way.
“This means making it very easy for them to create new content and then just slot it in without you having to download a lot of stuff. They’re going to make it very easy to keep it updated and add new content. That’s been their big goal. That’s what they’ve been working on.” Grubb also felt that it’s something that won’t release until next year.
Multiplayer isn’t necessarily a new thing for Naughty Dog – it’s been shipping multiplayer modes for several of its titles since Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception in 2011. However, given the success of titles like Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, it’s easy to see why Naughty Dog aimed for something bigger. We’ll have to wait for more details on the gameplay and overall story so stay tuned.
In the meantime, The Last of Us Part 1 is out on September 2nd for PS5 at $70. It’s also in development for PC with a release date still pending.