Oh and for them to just kind of casually drop this on the game's first big press reveal is also pretty shitty, not going to lie.
I was really excited to absorb all of the Part II stuff today, but this bit of news being casually dropped alongside everything has really soured my excitement.
I'm still going to play the game of course, and, as others have said, they probably fully know this from a numbers/stats perspective ("Axing multiplayer will have a negligible impact on sales..."), so I guess it's not too surprising. But it is incredibly disappointing.
It's like the exact opposite issue of the social/economical/psychological forces that nudge contemporary game design. Where instead of the game coming out and being a free-to-play, character/class/multi-role based multiplayer with a vibrant, expressive, multicultural-tinged aesthetic with a focus on player retention/engagement and continual in-app purchases as the monetization method; The Last of Us Part II is fully leaning into the other direction and cutting out its unique, tactical multiplayer as a result. It's pretty fucking sad, honestly. Yes, it'll be a great single player game. But the game could have been an incredible product that satisfied multiple desires.
Tight, clean, elegant multiplayer design such as Factions in the original seems like it just cannot exist today in the industry's current form.
