The Invisible King of Multiplayer
How Factions is the Last of Us’ best kept secret
It’s not altogether uncommon that I tell people The Last of Us is one of my favourite games. It was a game I sank countless hours into on the PlayStation 3, and a game I was happy to dip into a second time with the PlayStation 4 remaster.
Sitting as one of the highest rated PS3 titles on Metacritic, The Last of Us received resounding critical acclaim, with the singleplayer often cited as featuring some of the best story telling offered within our medium — especially among the bigger budget titles. However, it wasn’t because of its story, or its characters that I kept playing.
Players who booted up the The Last of Us are greeted with a simple set of options. Sitting at the top, was an option called The Last of Us — this allowed players to dive into the game’s campaign, and will have been where the vast majority of players spent their time. Just below this option was a setting called Factions.
For a game that’s by-and-large, thought of as a single player experience, Factions offered something else entirely. Hovering over Factions on the menu provided players with a brief but vague description.
For those who read the description, it’s easy enough to infer that Factions in-fact contained some form of competitive multiplayer offering — and you would be right. Rather remarkably, Factions took The Last of Us’ core gameplay, and funnelled it into a completely unique, multiplayer experience.
As a game that can be considered a third-person shooter at its core, it would have been easy to distil The Last of Us’ multiplayer down into a relatively straightforward, third-person shooter. Instead, Naughty Dog took the mechanics that worked so well in the single-player campaign, and leveraged them to create a tense multi-player experience where the atmosphere and sense of struggle fit perfectly with the games overall themes.
In The Last of Us Factions, you always feel as though you’re just barely getting by. Players can select a loadout, but each loadout only comes stocked with a handful of bullets, and this made every shot count. In a similar vein, players were required to manually heal, with bandages that were again, their own limited resource, emphasising this idea of resource management and strategy, throughout each multiplayer match.
Battle Royale tension (before Battle Royale)
In many ways, the mechanics seen in The Last of Us predate the gameplay mechanics seen in modern Battle Royale style games. In Factions, players are persistently fighting each other for crafting materials and scrap, in order to gain a slight advantage in the next fight. It’s not dissimilar to the way in which players hunt for loot in games like Call of Duty Blackout or PUBG.
“It [Factions] just felt brutal and atmospheric. No other game gets your heart going like Factions.”
Tanvir (a longterm player)
At the same time, The Last of Us still offers an experience that holds value today. Though Factions doesn’t feature a 100 (or even 60) player Battle Royale mode, the 4-vs-4 structure and traditional spawning enabled players to have that tense battle for resources, while retaining a more competitive atmosphere.
Instead of worrying about another team running up behind you and interrupting your gunfight, players only had to keep track of the five opponents that shared the map with them. Factions offered those tense moments that we now see commonly in Battle Royale games, yet these were distilled into fast moving, 10 minute matches with an emphasis on fairness and competitive validity over randomisation.
Time to kill and decision making
Ultimately, Factions was a game that was as heavily weighted towards decision making as it was its gunplay. The game featured a relatively long time-to-kill (it took a fair number of bullets to kill someone) which was crucial in two ways:
- Because you were rarely killed instantly, players almost always had an opportunity to react to what was happening around them, providing a moment to see if they could find a way to play out of a bad scenario.
- All of the previous decisions that the player had made, such as the armour they had crafted, the weapons they had chosen to use, and their positioning, all mattered in determining the outcome of an encounter.
While often tense and dramatic, this meant that the outcome of a match typically retained a sense of fairness. On top of this, Factions made every decision, every play, feel consequential. When players died, they didn’t just respawn, their team lost a life from their pool, ammunition was scarce, so every bullet fired needed to mean something. I think that it was because of these strong strategic elements, that in its hayday, Factions actually had a fairly strong competitive community.
“Lives were a resource, especially in survivor mode where you only had one, so tension was high.”
Tanvir (a long term player)
An oddly compelling meta-game
A unique meta-game existed between the intensity of each match. Each player had their own camp of survivors, and the multiplayer matches would play out so that you could gather more supplies for your camp. Perform well and you’d get more supplies, which meant you could keep your survivors alive.
The game would even connect to your social media and draw information from your pool of real friends, if you wanted. This was a slightly unusual, social element, but I couldn’t help but feel that this compelled me to do better in the matches. The thought that my group of survivors — which existed only as a number, and list of names in the multiplayer menu — might die if I didn’t perform well, added to the sense of tension in each multiplayer match.
Thousands of active players in 2019
All of this amounts to a multiplayer experience that, even to this day, stands as a unique and compelling offering. As such, it’s no surprise that the game still retains a dedicated — albeit small — community in 2019.
It’s the unique atmosphere and mechanics that keep people coming back. Features like the listen mode — which enable players to briefly visualise the audio of enemy players — and the mid-match looting/crafting contribute to a multiplayer experience that feels like no other.
Masterful multiplayer buried by a usability issue
While it’s great to celebrate the uniqueness and ingenuity of the design in this multiplayer mode, I think it’s also important to emphasise how the presentation of the multiplayer option may have harmed The Last of Us’ popularity. While Factions is typically well-received among those that played it, it’s not uncommon to hear active players talk about how they initially discovered the mode by mistake, or weren’t aware that the game even had multiplayer when they made their purchase.
In terms of the user experience design, developers usually want the main menu to intuitively communicate what the game has to offer, but that just wasn’t the case with The Last of Us. Without hovering over the option and reading the description, there was a strong chance that players wouldn’t know the multiplayer existed.
Perhaps just as significantly, Factions wasn’t announced with as much fanfare as you might expect for a multiplayer mode sitting within a triple-A game. Factions was revealed with a single trailer, very close to the games launch, making it unsurprising that many players just weren’t aware that the mode existed.
Factions, Part II
Unfortunately, Naughty Dog have thus far made very few comments on the multiplayer mode in The Last of Us Part II, which initially lead fans to worry whether we would see a return of Factions at all. Naughty Dog have since spoken out to confirm the return of Factions, yet no further details have been provided.
It’s easy to see why so many players see The Last of Us as a predominantly singleplayer experience and looking forward to Factions 2, that perception is unlikely to change. Perhaps this is an intentional component of the marketing strategy for the game — to pull people in with the narrative, and keep them playing with multiplayer. But this seems likely to lose its merit if players don’t hear about the multiplayer mode at all.
Ultimately, it’s hard not to feel that the mode would be more popular if more people were aware of its existence; it’d be nice to see Naughty Dog evangelise Factions more heavily in The Last of Us Part II.
Looking forward
My best moments in Factions were sitting on my couch, playing with my friends in college with two PS4s hooked up side by side. It was tense, dramatic, and the crafting and looting mechanics fed into one of the most strategic shooters I’ve ever played. Like many others, I find myself eagerly awaiting Naughty Dog’s next instalment in the series; I just hope that its multiplayer is given the opportunity to grow that it truly deserves.
