Movies News Talk
The Last Of Us Part 3: Avoiding the Mistakes of the Past
Fans are practically foaming at the mouth waiting for The Last of Us Part 3! It's been over four years since the last main game. Neil Druckmann confirmed it in February 2024, but details remain scarce: plot, characters, release date…everything's a mystery! The hype is especially crazy after HBO's successful show, which brought tons of new fans to the series. While Part 3 needs its own identity; one completely independent of prior storylines, there's a MASSIVE opportunity to recapture some past brilliance.
The original Last of Us had awesome multiplayer with its Factions mode. Part 2 infamously ditched it – a huge bummer for fans! It seems that making it right needs Part 3. The original multiplayer mode felt like the game itself, yet better and made to be even more suspenseful and tense. And guess what? Part 3 could learn from those mistakes of the original design of Factions and add more.
The first Last of Us totally blew minds with Factions – its multiplayer mode which felt tense, intense and brutal; it brought to life that post-apocalyptic world perfectly! Many thought Part 2 would expand on this but it became single-player only. It completely lacked that prior game element; making its omission confusing, disappointing those who felt cheated from having these gameplay choices. Yet it improved!
There's another layer to this story though. Naughty Dog did announce a standalone Last of Us Online multiplayer game—a HUGE announcement at first! Fans were stoked, even after facing that initial disappointment concerning Part 2’s omission of multiplayer entirely! And that ended up getting canceled in December 2023 – talk about some serious, completely disastrous misteps! There's really not much we can say about this aspect of production. So those years of waiting will have seemingly all resulted in nothingness.
That absence of multiplayer for Part 2 seriously stung fans – there were many people complaining; a very huge loss; an unfortunate thing. So guess what is expected? A major comeback! Everyone's betting on Part 3 to bring it back. But this is extremely crucial; there was something really crucial to get changed in that future multiplayer experience. We're talking about paid DLC. Seriously. That totally hurt the original. Certain perks, weapons…they weren’t free. A total restriction which made otherwise very fun online modes annoying, restricting gamers from enjoying various play styles and options available.
For Part 3 to really work, those kinds of things shouldn't happen again; This really makes for an obvious solution, showing some extremely obvious needs concerning improvements.
This storyline deserves a detailed approach concerning where exactly its storyline must head. Both The Last of Us and The Walking Dead are the top zombie franchises; both shows grew enormously from the game. That's amazing success – showing that game adaptation and television can both benefit greatly. But it also has its consequences: there are inherent issues that should be corrected to fully consider and to analyze potential implications to avoid a future mess. For example, The Walking Dead started by sticking to its comics; eventually diverging significantly creating multiple stories across the whole show and several unrelated and other similar yet vastly different storylines. This may not work well!
The Last of Us is vastly different; prioritizing those detailed character arcs instead of just emphasizing that "survival" narrative. Going beyond those storylines from the games is a recipe for disaster – and something that really does greatly change how the whole narrative operates itself.
The Last of Us Part 3 is coming, which generates lots of exciting possibilities. A smart multiplayer comeback, similar to the original, without DLC locks—this fixes some old problems that were otherwise easily overlooked yet were problematic enough to generate tons of discussions from the earlier multiplayer communities and fanbase and those decisions changed everything concerning those aspects which affect audiences, game producers and more. This should come back, to make up for that massive disappointment for Part 2 and its failure.
And it’s critical; avoid The Walking Dead route. Stay true to the game storylines to preserve its greatness and narrative integrity. This makes the anticipation enormous: that much-needed story conclusion, a game ending which remains uncertain even now, only adding additional fuel to the anticipation.