Naughty Dog’s newest job listings for its upcoming game, tentatively titled Factions, hint that it could be a free-to-play title, possibly one of the first live service games under the PlayStation banner.
For those uninitiated, this will need some explanation. For the original The Last Of Us on the PlayStation 3 in 2013, Naughty Dog experimented with a multiplayer game mode, simply called Factions.
You choose to join either the Fireflies or Hunters, but instead of jumping into several quick game modes, you are added to a group of survivors that have to last twelve in game weeks.
And so, as an added incentive to the multiplayer modes, you are tasked with helping this group survive by fighting and winning in the different game modes. The longer you last these twelve weeks, the more people join your group. That means you will need to get even more supplies to ensure everyone survives at the end.
The multiplayer modes themselves have also been adapted to fit the world of The Last Of Us. Team Deathmatch is the most conventional among these modes, which offers a set amount of respawns. On the other hand, Supply Raid plays like Team Deathmatch, but with only one life each. Lastly, Interrogation requires that you collect a number of interrogations on your enemies before you can get at enemy lockboxes.
The Last Of Us multiplayer is nothing like Call of Duty multiplayer. These start out slow, but can end rapidly quickly when one player is found by the enemy. Naughty Dog has added a pity system, that ensures teams have a fighting chance until the bitter end.
As far back as 2019, Naughty Dog revealed that they would not carry over a multiplayer mode for The Last of Us 2. However, at the same time they also dropped teases for a separate multiplayer game, as they realized that they had expanded what would have been The Last Of Us 2’s online mode so much that it deserved to be made as a separate game.
Jump to today, Naughty Dog has a new job listing for a Live Ops Producer. As defined in Microsoft’s Developer Resources, Live Ops is a portmanteau of the words Live and Operations. Live Ops is actually a different approach to game development than conventional AAA single player video game development, and different to even Games As A Service. To put it simply, Live Ops is about managing the design of video games, in such a way that not only do they get players to keep going back to play, but that they evolve the relationship between the games and the gamers themselves.
Live Ops does not have to be applied to a live service game setting, much less a free-to-play game. However, part of the bonus skills in that job listing is “Proven experience in a production role supporting a AAA, free to play, live title.”
It makes sense for Naughty Dog to be looking for an experienced Live Ops producer, as these are skillsets that are beyond their wheelhouse. They could definitely use experienced hands to guide them into this new direction.
This also lines up with Sony’s announced plans to launch several live service games in the near future. Going free to play, however, would be a huge game changer. While it’s certain that a large install base of PlayStation players would play Naughty Dog’s Factions game on their consoles, there is an even bigger potential for players, and profit, when Sony brings this game to PC.
