"The Year of The Last of Us" In Review
"The Year of The Last of Us" In Review
A year ago, I wrote a piece titled "The Year of The Last of Us." Naughty Dog was celebrating a decade of Joel and Ellie in 2023 and it felt like there would be a lot of celebration and (good) news.
Even as it turns 10 years old, it feels like The Last of Us has only just begun, and this busy year will certainly show why.
Turns out that the year was busy, but not due to celebratory news.
The HBO Show
The long-awaited TV adaptation came out and did quite well, if the current season of award shows indicates anything. I was a bit cooler on it, but the show was executed well. It was a great way to kick of the 10th year of the franchise.
Out of the show, we also got the origin story of Ellie's birth and saw her mother, Anna, for the first time—wonderfully played by Ashley Johnson.
Season 2 is entering production and is aiming for 2025. Later in the year, there were rumors that Kaitlyn Dever is portraying Abby in the second season.
The Last of Us Part I PC Port
Out this March. I really need to build a gaming/capture/streaming PC some day.
Maybe I don't, because the current state of AAA PC games seems to be abysmal. You know the PC launch for Part I was bad when Digital Foundry's initial, hour-long video description reads,
It's impossible to produce the usual DF-style PC tech review for The Last of Us Part 1 because the port launched in a bad state and hotfixes are arriving rapidly - any review would be out of date very quickly. In this video, Alex, John and Rich play the game on two sets of PC hardware, up against the PS5 version in performance mode. We isolate the key issues and highlight how the game needs to improve.
The game came out at the end of March and by July received 11 patches. It appears that the front half of the year was a blitz to make the PC port playable, after delaying said port to make sure the game was in "the best shape possible." If it launched in a dire state, thus making that the best shape possible, can you imagine where it was around the original target of March 3, 2023?
The TLOU Board Game
The team at Themeborne did not hit the 2023 release target, but the game does appear to be shaping up nicely based of the Kickstarter updates I am receiving. Samples appear to be in hand and are said to be going into production early this year. I think the game looks real good.
A Decade of The Last of Us
This felt like a slam dunk opportunity. Instead of going all out with celebration on the 10 year anniversary, Naughty Dog just had a blog post interview with key staff at the studio. Those interviewed were Evan Wells, Christian Gyrling, Erick Pangilinan, Eric Baldwin, Hyoung Taek Nam, Matthew Gallant, and Shaun Escayg: The first two are no longer being at the studio.
Sure Neil opened up the post, but it struck me as odd to not have him involved in answering the list of questions. It would have been nice to ask Bruce Straley as well, even though he is no longer at the Kennel. While I am all for behind-the-scenes and dev insight, this felt lackluster to honor the anniversary itself.
Oh, I'm sorry. They had a cake making influencer make a replica of Joel's watch too.
Halloween Horror Nights
Living in Florida has its perks from time to time.
The Last of Us Day (aka Outbreak Day) (aka the anniversary of my wife going into labor1)
This is almost more of the same from the anniversary. Follow up on the art gallery and Halloween Horror Nights, some new posters from Fangamer, new merch at PlayStation, a Pearl Jam tee, and a Troy Baker concert. Call me a downer, but I think this is lackluster for the community day during the decade celebration.
The Last of Us Part II Remastered Leaks
One more bit before the big one, but right at the end of the year , Sony leaked the existence of a PS5 remaster of Part II. It is a little sad, funny, and ironic that there are more remasters and remakes in the core series than numbered entries themselves.
I am curious what the gains will be graphically, since the game received a PS5 patch. The more exciting additions are the No Return roguelike mode and the Lost Levels, which let players walk around unfinished bits with commentary. I'm jazzed to play next weekend.
The Last of Us Online Dies
Here's a story in four headlines
- The Last of Us Multiplayer Game Drip Feed Keeps on Dripping dated January 6, 2023.
- The Last of Us Multiplayer Game is going to Pop Off dated January 9, 2023
- The Last of Us Factions Multiplayer Game Delayed dated May, 26, 2023
- Naughty Dog Cancels The Last of Us Online dated December 15, 2023
It's no surprise I was a believer in The Last of Us Online. The directing team was stacked. The idea of character and story fused with the tense last-man standing gameplay of Factions (and Fortnite) sounds right up my alley. The game had been in development for over six years, Naughty Dog's longest development cycle to date.
How did the game go from this grand, ambitious title to dead in the water? We don't know the whole story and may not for some time. My gut says it was caught up between expectations, ambitions, requirements, and services.
It's no secret that during the early development of Part II that battle royales became the hotness. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds blew up in the front half of 2017, then Fortnite came out with their own battle royale mode in September 2017 and took over. Plenty of prominent team members were into said hotness.
The leap from Factions to a battle royale is more of a hop, especially if you play in the survivors mode. Take that intensity, combine it with lofty goals of "delivering incredible stories, characters, and gameplay" and you get something that sounds like it'd be a blast. This fusion sounds spot on when you look at job descriptions in 2018.
With the end of the PS4 in sight, 2019 would feature news about the PS5 dripping out in Wired articles. Jim Ryan became the president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. The transition in power, both in hardware and leadership, was in effect. In September 2019, Naughty Dog announced that ambitions grew too large and that Part II would not have a multiplayer component, but rather that those efforts would see the light of day down the road. The sequel came out in the summer of 2020 and work on the multiplayer game kept on marching forward.
In 2022 though, things at Sony changed. In February, during an investor presentation, Sony announced plans to release 10 live services games over the next four years (2022-2026). This was right after their acquisition of Bungie. This multiplayer project seemed to fit the bill as one of the promised ten.
The world got a first look at the Factions game in the summer with some concept art. In November, Fortnite Battle Pass Designer Anders Howard joins Naughty Dog. Not even a year later, Jim Ryan announces his retirement and then Anders Howard leaves Naughty Dog in October 2023.
I'm not saying that Jim's retirement is tied directly to Howard leaving. I'm just trying to line up events in a more condensed fashion than I usually do.
And right in between those hires and departures, Bungie reviewed the live service projects and "raised questions about the The Last of Us multiplayer project’s ability to keep players engaged for a long period of time, which led to the reassessment."
Somewhere along the way, The Last of Us Online got swept up in live service ambitions of Sony and PlayStation. When single player games are costing $200+ million, PlayStation wants to reuse assets and recoup costs more and more. I think it went from a strong, neat online game that'd be supported for a couple years and kept up to something that had to perform at a high level for years and years.
But from inception, this game was never designed as a years and years long live service game. In those early design years, let's say 2017-2020, the Fortnite-ifcation of The Last of Us was not the plan. And when you don't design that in at the beginning, at the core of the game, you'll never get it to stick. Jim Ryan and SIE tried to fit a square peg in a round hole.
And over the last year or two, Naughty Dog and Sony have been hammering away trying to make it fit. They hired the right people. The bought a studio whose opinion they trusted (probably far too much so). And they couldn't get it to work. In the end, Naughty Dog was faced with this.
In ramping up to full production2, the massive scope of our ambition became clear. To release and support The Last of Us Online we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games.
Let's translate this:
To transform The Last Of Us Online as a live service game, we'd have to put our studio of 400~ developers on supporting the game, its community, and content for years to come. We would have to stop making single-player games.
And someone had the sense to stop and say no, our prized single-player team, who has helped establish PlayStation as a core brand since the beginning, cannot stop making what the make best. It went on for too long though. There was a lack of direction, management, unified vision, and conviction to say the game is what the game is.
When you look at it all, the tin anniversary of one of PlayStation's biggest IPs was a bust. Everything outside of Naughty Dog was ephemeral and what was cooking inside the Kennel came out broken, leaked, or died. It's a shame.
That doesn't mean the future is dark. The HBO show will continue to be a success; I'd bet on it. I have no doubt that The Last of Us Part III is in the works and will, more than likely, be Naughty Dog's next game.3 I wish the people behind the games that mean so much to me and 37 million others, had the opportunity to celebrate in a manner The Last of Us deserved.
It has been an unbelievable 10 years, and to know the journey of our characters has meant so much to so many of you moves our team. Thank you for your support and appreciation for the work our teams do. We hope you’ll continue to follow us along this road, just don’t forget to pack a brick or bottle.
Until next time, endure and survive,
— Neil
"Endure and survive," indeed.