Tweet
Up until about two months ago, gamers didn’t even know that Naughty Dog’s highly anticipated survival title, The Last of Us, offered an online multiplayer experience. Most assumed that, like the first Uncharted, The Last of Us would be a singleplayer-only experience, perhaps even a singular, one-off experience (read: no sequels).
However, that was not the case, and as it turns out Naughty Dog was tooling The Last of Us’ multiplayer to be”best ever.” We won’t know for sure how valid those claims are until the game releases, but a new trailer better explains how the online experience will work.
The trailer comes right on the heels of first details for The Last of Us‘ multiplayer. Through several hands-on previews of the mode, we learned that the game will group players into clans, and those clans will work together to accomplish specific goals. Essentially, the multiplayer will mimic the world-state in The Last of Us, only on a larger scale, with the end goal of surviving for a 12-week period.
Unfortunately, the above trailer doesn’t do much to explain the multiplayer’s mechanics or structure. It’s a teaser trailer more than anything else.
We see players using different types of items, a smoke bomb for example, to sneak up on other players and take them out with crude tools like a bat or knife. What makes the player’s weapons unique, though, is that they come from what appears to be an extensive crafting system. There are also more traditional weapons to work with, but if the multiplayer holds true to the singleplayer’s concepts ammo should be scarce.
Overall, the multiplayer looks unique. It offers a chance for players to join together as survivors and work towards a common goal. There also appear to be daily “events” whereby Naughty Dog can dictate what clans are required to do to survive.
The Last of Us’ is not exactly a new idea – Red Dead Redemption introduced a similar grouping feature with posses – but it has some potential if Naughty Dog can support the multiplayer well.
On its face, though, there still seems to be a lot of traditional multiplayer ideas at play in The Last of Us, which may disappoint those who heard “best multiplayer ever,” and thought we were getting something completely new. We’ll know just how great the multiplayer is (or isn’t) when the game hits store shelves later this month.
The Last of Us releases June 14, 2013 for the PS3