The Last of Us should never have been more than one game – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

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 Summer Game Fest 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 Xbox 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 leftThe Last Of Us remake 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 the 10 Sony says it’s publishing 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