Former PlayStation boss confirms he played The Last of Us multiplayer, but it was incompatible with Intergalactic

Shuhei Yoshida’s two-hour interview with Colin Moriarty on the Sacred Symbols podcast has given us plenty to talk about. The now retired former president of PlayStation Studios spoke in detail and with sincerity about various aspects of his long career at the company, of which he has a lot to say, having been one of the first members of Sony Computer Entertainment that would create the original PlayStation and the phenomenon around it. Much of the interview focused on the recent past: what happened with Japan Studios, From Software, and the circumstances of various internal projects during his time. One of the names mentioned was Factions, the ambitious standalone multiplayer game that Naughty Dog was preparing for The Last of Us 2 and which was ultimately canceled.

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As Yoshida explains, the California studio wanted to do this and had ambitious plans to place it in the Games as a Service space. Fans had well received the multiplayer in The Last of Us, and the action and movement gameplay base of the sequel promised to be a solid foundation for a more ambitious multiplayer. This time around, they didn’t want to just make a “multiplayer mode,” they wanted to make a title with its own identity that could compete in one of the most competitive spaces in the industry, which meant not just initial development, but ongoing development.

The executive also confirms that he was able to try it out, calling it “great,” but the problem came when Naughty Dog representatives sat next to Bungie representatives. Sony had bought the creators of Halo and Destiny not only for their production capabilities, but also for their extensive experience in making multiplayer and service games, with the idea that this knowledge would spread to the rest of the internal studios. After these conversations and seeing firsthand what it means to be in this space and compete in it, Neil Druckmann’s studio came to the conclusion that their plans with Factions would prevent them from developing their new project: Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. It was a “lack of foresight,” the executive lamented.

Some people think that Naughty Dog could have taken what they had and turned it into a multiplayer game, giving the title a game mode that the first part had, without the GaaS ambitions. But changing the direction of a development is not as easy as taking a pair of scissors and trimming what’s left. In any case, it seems that Factions will continue to sleep the sleep of the just, and like so many other things, we will have to settle for what could have been and what was not.

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