I rate this week’s PlayStation Showcase moderately high. Most of the big reveals were things we already knew (sorry, Snake Eater) so they weren’t full of surprises, but there were quite a few games I was looking forward to. Despite how great Spider-Man 2 looked and it’s tempting to pay $550 for a PSVR2 for Resident Evil 4 right now, the reason I’m not happy about the presentation is the Sony First’s glaring lack. – Party game. This showcase did not give me a good sense of what Sony’s main studios were planning for the future, excluding Bungie, and I can’t help but think of undisclosed games more than released ones. Chief among them is the previously announced multiplayer game The Last of Us. When is this not the right time to finally reveal it?
We don’t even know the title yet, as we know very little about Naughty Dog’s next game. We know there will be a sequel to TLOU’s Factions game mode since it wasn’t in The Last Of Us Part 2, released in 2020. Us Universe (Factions 2) when job postings were discovered in mid-2021. At Summer Game Fest 2022, studio director Neil Druckmann took the stage to share concept art for the new game and describe it as the most ambitious game Naughty Dog has ever made. At the time, he promised that 2023 would finally see the game unveiled.
We saw more concept art in January and reiterated that more details will come this year. But at Sony’s massive PlayStation Showcase this week, which cuts down on the usual State of Play live stream and presents an hour-long presentation that only happens once every two years, Factions 2 wasn’t the show. If there’s one game you’d bet money on at the showcase, it’s this one. Had it appeared, it would have been the most talked about game of the entire show.
This was like a moment of great revelation and I don’t know what to expect now. Perhaps Druckmann plans to come back and show off the game at Summer Game Fest two weeks later, like last year, but it seems odd to have such a massive PlayStation showcase right before SGF if Sony is just going to save it. Best for different shows. Considering that Keighley’s showcase is just around the corner, there’s probably nothing in the PlayStation showcase that we haven’t seen, or that we haven’t been able to wait a month or two to see. Street Fighter and Final Fantasy 16 were the only games to be featured on the PlayStation Show over the next few weeks, and we’ve already seen a lot of both. Sony could have built this entire show around Factions 2, and if this showcase took place at the end of summer, there was still time for some Spider-Man 2 gameplay. Why are we doing this showcase without the next big PlayStation games?
Anticipation has been set for news about the next TLOU game, and at this point, Sony is responsible for letting us know when it’s released. no scheduled to be shown. It would be nice if they released their own random play state later this year, but I feel like I wasted my chance. Opinions are divided on the quality of this showcase, but the Factions 2 reveal would have felt far more important. Naughty Dog reserves the right to take as long as the game requires, and we’re excited to see what we’re working on whenever it’s ready to be released. I’m waiting, but it’s a pity that I’m still waiting without seeing the end.