Sony Stops a Fan-Made The Last of Us Part 2 Multiplayer Mod, and It Stings

Honestly, this one stings a little.

If you ever lost an evening to Factions in the original The Last of Us - crouched behind a car, holding your breath, hoping the other team hadn't crafted a shiv - you know why people have been waiting years for multiplayer in Part 2. Naughty Dog's standalone online project was cancelled back in 2023, and since then the dream has mostly lived on in fan wishlists. And, for a while, in one modder's PC build.

That modder is Speclizer, who has been working on a PvP multiplayer mod for The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered on PC since January. Development clips shared along the way showed matchmaking, loadouts, custom menus, maps and, in later updates, 4v4 matches. The plan was to release it this month.

That's not happening anymore. Speclizer posted on social media that they'd received a letter on behalf of Sony Interactive Entertainment asking for the mod not to be released. They called it "extremely sad" that the project never got to see the light of day, and said their next project will be something entirely their own.

Two things are worth being clear about. The letter itself hasn't been made public, and Sony hasn't commented publicly either, so we don't know the exact reasoning. And legally, this is Sony's call - it's their game, their characters, their assets, and a full multiplayer mode is a much bigger deal than a hat swap or a photo mode tweak.

Still, I can't pretend I'm happy about it. Here's what gets me: there's no official way to play Part 2 with other people. No Factions mode, no online spin-off, nothing. When a studio leaves a gap that big and a fan spends months lovingly trying to fill it - on a platform where modding is part of the culture - stepping in right before launch feels less like protecting a franchise and more like closing the door on the people who care about it most.

I'd also love to know whether there's something bigger behind it. Is Sony keeping room for its own multiplayer plans with the series? Maybe. Maybe it's just standard legal caution. Without a word from Sony, anything beyond that is guesswork, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What I do know is that Speclizer clearly has the chops. Building matchmaking and 4v4 matches into a single-player game is not a weekend project. If their next thing is fully original, I'll absolutely be watching. And to the Factions crowd refreshing Speclizer's page this week: I'm sad with you.

Image: Pete Ellis / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Last_of_Us_Part_II_marketing_-_train.jpg