I never wanted 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Online. The world doesn't revolve around me, and I'm still sad that all the hard work poured into it 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:will never see the light of day, but it never seemed like the game 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Naughty Dog should be making. We know from Factions’ cancellation statement that the studio is now working on two single-player games, one of which is likely 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:its new fantasy IP and the second of which may be The Last of Us Part 3, but I don't think it needs to be one or the other when it comes to single player or multiplayer. It just needs to be 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:multiplayer in the right way.

Originally, The Last of Us Online was supposed to launch with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2. Back then, nobody called it The Last of Us Online - it was just Factions 2. Fa♍ctions was a popular part of the original game as a small but mighty multiplayer mode that let you take the combat mechanics of The Last of Us into an online showdown with friends. It was brutal, creative, and had some original narrative and gameplay mechanics other multiplayer modes didn’t have back in🧜 2013.

It was pretty neat. So neat that everyone was very excited to see it make a return, and when it was cut from the release to make a fully-fledged version of it, that excitement grew. But then, in time, ebbed away again, as it became clear that this was no longer The Last of Us online with friends, but The Last of Us Online. Capital O. A live-service, eternally evolving, inescapable ecosystem♔ designed to drain wallets with tempting battle passes and years of updates.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted, Naughty Dog’s other behemoth, also consistently had a popular multiplayer that worked just fine as an extra mode ra🔯ther than needing a full game.

It makes me miss the days of the old wonky multiplayer modes that were slapped in there just because. Like the modern obsession Sony has with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:live-service endeavours, these multiplayer modes weren't entirely organic. Games with multiplayer were thought to sell better and offer a new demographic to appeal to, so lots of single-player series added new online modes. But unlike today, where everything needs to be fine-tuned to perfect the art of cash extraction, there was a bit of a 'do whatever you want as long as you can play with other people' to it.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin's Creed's multiplayer is usually the example people reach for here, with its weird Hitman-style target prompts and the ways it lets you blend in with the crowd, hiding in plain sight amongst the populace, waiting to strike, all while not giving yourself away for anyone who might be hunting you. For me though, the peak of this was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect 3's PvE m🔴ode, which let you unlock new characters - including playing as other races for the first time, and getting new powers like the biotic lash.

Looking back, it feels sellotaped✃ together, with all of the maps just locations from the base game, but getting to play as so many different creatures and each of them feeling unique added a whole new sense of d🍃epth to the game, especially as it played into the strength of your overall army in the campaign itself. Sorry, Galactic Readiness.

Though it's never mentioned, I also have a special place in my heart for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider's multiplayer mode. All of the modes were pretty standard rip-offs of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty like Team Deathmatch or Capture the Flag, with some variable objectives depending on whether you were a Survivor (ie a bunch of fake wannabe Laras who exist entirely for the mode) or a Solarii (the baddies). It had a little bit of traversal to it but basically had no business being anywhere near a Tomb Raider game, was not connected to Tomb Raider by any thread of reality, and played nothing like Tomb Rꦇaider. I loved it.

We didn't know how lucky we were

Not every game handled the change so well. Having loved Mass Effect 3's online mode, I had high hopes for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age Inquisition's version of the trend, but no matter how low they had been, they wouldn't have been reached. For whatever reason, it just didn't click. That and Andromeda's, which was basically just ME3 if it broke every single time you played it, signalled the end of this era. Dragon Age overcomplicated things, trying to do something new in a mode that was growing stale, while audiences were bored and true live-service titles were emerging.

Now it feels like we've come full circle. The era of live-service games hasn't ended, but the bubble has burst for new ones to get in on the ground floor. A bird in the hand is worth two in the mixed metaphor I always say. The titans of the genre, like Fortnite or Apex, still draw in huge crowds and massive prꦆofits, but trying to squeeze into the marketplace now is too large a challenge to be worth the effort, even for a studio like Naughty Dog.

Could that mean a return of this 'often rubbish but still very cool' period of tacked on multiplayer games? It would certainly be more enjoyable than forcing the strange live-service trappings that don't offer anything to the experience besides weird, percentage-based guns. Single player games take too long and cost too much these days anyway, so the fad might be over for good, but knowing what we know now, you, me, and everybody at Naughty Dog would have taken a bite-sized Factions 2 in Part 2 overspending another three years on a game that just got flushed.