The Last of Us Multiplayer Won’t Be “Tacked On” According to Naughty Dog

Hot on the heels of yesterday's announcement that The Last of Us will have multiplayer, Naughty Dog Community Strategist Arne Meyer has responded to fan concerns that multiplayer is being "tacked on" over on the official PlayStation Blog.

It seems fans are concerned that The Last of Us' inclusion of multiplayer is being tacked on by Naughty Dog and its addition might compromise the quality of the single-player campaign. This is not the case according to Meyer, and he also reveals that they have separate teams working on each of the game's components.

We don’t approach MP in any of our games as tacked on. And we also always have separate teams working on the different components so that we can maintain full focus on making SP and MP up to our standards.

And we have faith that our MP will stand on it’s own. If we felt like it would be tacked on, we wouldn’t have added it. We want all our game experiences to be of the highest quality and that’s what we work extremely hard to deliver.

TLOU has been in preproduction and production for quite some time – the SP portion of the game hasn’t been skimped out on in any way.

MP has never taken away resources from the SP game in any of our games, always separate teams, separate resources. The folks working on the single player campaign always have the resources and support to complete that portion of the game to the vision they planned for.

To be frank, I honestly think the concerns of fans this time are unwarranted. I mean, the same has been said for Naughty Dog's excellent Uncharted franchise and we all know its multiplayer turned out to be good. While I don't think it will be replacing Call of Duty or Battlefield as everyone's multiplayer fix, it was still a well-made part of the game that I'm not surprised people are still actively playing Uncharted 3 competitively.

Are you concerned that the addition of multiplayer for The Last of Us will water down the single-player or do you trust Naughty Dog enough now to do the right thing?

The Last of Us is set for a May 7, 2013 release exclusively for the PS3.

Thanks, MP1st