A fan-made PvP mod for the PC version of The Last of Us Part II was supposed to go public this month. The person building it says that is off.
Speclizer posted the news on September 13. Development started in January. A letter arrived, they say, from Sony Interactive Entertainment, asking that the mod not ship.
Sony and Naughty Dog have not posted their own statement. What we have is the modder’s account of that letter.
What was actually built
This was not a one-map proof of concept. Over the summer Speclizer put up long gameplay clips: 4v4, matchmaking, leaderboards, healing and kit pickups, perks, a custom backpack menu, ammo drops on kills, and a limited listen mode that reused the swim-breath meter the way old Factions listen mode worked. One clip from late August:
There was also a YouTube dump of about 25 minutes of footage in June. A Seraphite Forest-style map showed up in later builds. Work was partly supported on Patreon, which is the kind of detail publishers tend to notice.
Why this one stung
Part II was supposed to ship with official multiplayer. Neil Druckmann cut that in 2019 so the studio could throw everything at the single-player campaign. Naughty Dog later promised a standalone online game. Concept art for The Last of Us Online landed in 2022. In 2023 the live-service project was cancelled so the team would not be locked into years of live ops instead of new single-player games.
Former staff have since said the official multiplayer was far along and, in their view, very good. That is the vacuum this mod was walking into. Sony stopping it is consistent with how the company has treated other high-profile fan projects that get close to a public release. It is also their IP.
What happens now
Speclizer says the next thing will be original work, not another Last of Us project. There is still no official Factions-style game on a calendar. Until Sony or Naughty Dog change that, Part II on PC stays a single-player game.