I rate this week’s PlayStation showcase moderately high. It wasn’t packed with surprises, since most of the big reveals were things we already knew about (sorry, Snake Eater), but there were a fair few games shown that I’m looking forward to. The reason I’m not over the moon about the presentation, despite how cool Spider-Man 2 looked and the fact that I’m now tempted to shell out $550 for a PSVR2 for Resident Evil 4 alone, is the noticeable lack of Sony first-party games. This showcase didn’t give me a good sense of what Sony’s main studios other than Bungie have planned for the future, and I can’t help thinking about the games that weren’t revealed more than the games that were. Chief among them, the previously announced multiplayer The Last of Us game. If this wasn’t the right time to finally unveil that, then when is?

We know so little about Naughty Dog’s next game that we don’t even know its title yet. We’ve known that some kind of sequel to TLOU’s Factions game mode was coming ever since it was absent from The Last Of Us Part 2 when it released in 2020. The studio confirmed it was working on a standalone multiplayer game set in The Last of Us universe (so, Factions 2) when job postings for it were discovered in mid-2021. During Summer Game Fest 2022, studio director Neil Druckmann took the stage to share concept art of the new game, and described it as the most ambitious game Naughty Dog has ever made. At the time, he promised we’d finally see the game revealed in 2023.

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We saw some more concept art in January, at which point it was reiterated that more details would be coming this year. But this week, during Sony’s big PlayStation Showcase, an hour-long presentation that dwarfs the typical State of Play livestreams and only happens every couple of years, Factions 2 was a no show. If there was one game I would have bet money on seeing during the showcase, it was this one. Had it shown up, it would have easily been the most talked about game in the entire show.

A concept image for The Last of Us' Factions sequel.

This seemed like the moment for a big reveal, and now I don’t know what to expect. Maybe Druckmann is planning to make another appearance at Summer Game Fest in two weeks like he did last year and show off the game then, but it seems strange to have such a massive PlayStation showcase right before SGF, if Sony is just going to save its best for a different show. There really wasn’t anything in the PlayStation showcase we haven’t seen, or couldn’t have waited a month or two to see, considering Keighley’s showcase is right around the corner. Street Fighter and Final Fantasy 16 were the only games coming in the next few weeks featured during the PlayStation show, and we’ve seen plenty of both of them already. Sony could have built this entire show around Factions 2 and still had time for some Spider-Man 2 gameplay if this Showcase had taken place at the end of summer. Why even do this showcase without the next big PlayStation game?

Expectations for news about the next TLOU game have been set, and at this point Sony has a responsibility to tell us when it isn’t going to be shown. If it's just going to have its own random State of Play reveal later this year that’s fine, but it feels like a wasted opportunity. Opinions are split on the quality of this showcase, but a Factions 2 reveal would have made it feel much more significant. Naughty Dog is well within its rights to take as long as it needs to on its games and I’ll be excited to see what it’s been working on whenever its ready to reveal it, but this felt like the moment to finally show us what we’re waiting for, and it’s disappointing to still be waiting without any end in sight.

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