TLoU Factions: A Few Survival Tips


Although The Last of Us has been out for nearly 2 years on the PlayStation 3, and nearly a year on the PlayStation 4, it is still a massively popular game both in terms of single player and multiplayer. The latter, called Factions, has just started getting a whole new wave of players because Naughty Dog and Sony just launched a standalone package of it this week. No longer does it require a full copy of The Last of Us to play; for $9.99 (US), you can now get the Factions multiplayer by itself in a fully usable form, though you may wish to invest a bit more and get the additional map packs and maybe some of the additional weapons DLC packs. While you can kill with any weapon in the game, some of the DLC offers distinct advantages that are well worth the purchase price.

That said, here are a few important and good things to know.

Factions Has *NO* “Levels”!!

The numbers to the left of a player’s name in the lobby screen are not an indication of how powerful the player is, with one caveat. This number is the number of “weeks” their character has gone through with their colony of survivors. The longer the colony survives and the more parts you earn, the more one-time boosters you earn to help you in the game, and potentially the larger your colony. Initially as you survive to and through a certain number of weeks, 15 I believe, you gain more load out points which enable you to pick up more and/or better skills and weapons, including an in-game “purchasable” weapon that is usually absurdly powerful. But once you hit 13 load out points, you’ve hit the ceiling, the only differences between you and someone with 100 or more weeks of survival are skill and experience. They will have no special advantage over you which is a great equalizing factor. This weeks indicator should imply that the player has a certain amount of experience, and should be better than a player that hasn’t played as much, but in all honesty, it rarely does.

The reason I have to emphasize this is that my buddy was playing in a match recently and after the match got a PSN message that basically read as the following:

you’re an asshole, My friend and i just started playing and you were a dick. level 200’s should have their own areas.

First of all, since there are no levels, there’s no way to protect a new player from vastly superior players that have thousand yard stares; the game just doesn’t distinguish player skill or ability that way. While I’ve played TLoU on both PS3 and PS4 and have gotten a lot of experience in both single and multiplayer, my colony survival length has never been all that high; currently it’s at 22 weeks, which makes me seem like a newer player; I may not be on the same skill level as some of the more dedicated players, but you’d be a fool to take me for an easy mark in this game. Similarly, while my buddy and I were playing a few nights ago, a member of our team had a colony that survived for some 800 weeks; frankly, he played like shit.

While I do mostly agree that more experienced players should be put in games together as opposed to dropping new players into matches against them, it’s the perfect place and way to learn. I hate to admit that this is true, but the best way to learn is from players better than you. Second best way is to learn from players that at worse than you if you have enough sense to figure out what they’re doing wrong.

In short, think it’s unfair some “level” 200 kicked your ass? You may actually might have only caught them on a good night; everyone gets lucky some time. Beware the “level” 5 that has been in the entire match but some how managed to avoid death altogether while racking up 6-10 kills; they’re the ringer you need to look out for.

Think Like a Tactician

Watching my aforementioned buddy play this evening, I saw him make a silly mistake that resulted in him getting killed in one particular match: he walked into a room and went straight towards the exit on the other side. A few steps into the room, he was shiv’ed by an opponent. To taunt him, I wrote a message a little less revised than this one to him on Twitch:

Lest you seek a wake with mourners, always be sure to check the corners.

I think that’s pretty clear; check the corners to make sure there’s no one standing there next to you, wondering how you didn’t see them. It might be a little slow to do it, but it’s far better than having someone kill you a moment later because you didn’t bother to look for them. A lot of the time, if they’re hiding like that, they’re out of ammo, and looking just to get to a supply box to get some ammo; very few players are actively waiting and looking for situations like that, though it does occasionally fall in their lap. Don’t be a statistic!

Related to this idea, is to be mindful of your flanks and those of your teammates. Always keep your eyes open and if you see an opponent moving in a teammate’s blind-spot, mark them by aiming your weapon at them and tapping R3 (press the right stick in). Unless they have Covert Training 3, they’ll be marked and your character will shout out a warning; this works even if you don’t have a headset or don’t feel like talking to the other players, and helps you and your team. In fact, marking an opponent can even be more helpful than shooting at the enemy in some situations. I’d like to say I hate to quote a character or movie, but keep your head on a swivel, always look for your enemy to come at you from the side or back or above or below. Never just approach anything looking in a single direction.

Oh, and one other significant thing… DON’T FUCKING RUN UNLESS YOU HAVE TO!!! And *IF* you *HAVE* to run,DON’T RUN *TOWARDS* your allies! When you run, you appear on the minimap as a red dot that is clearly visible to all enemy players. When you run towards your teammates, you effectively tell your opponents exactly where they are. Similarly, although not necessarily as important, if you get downed in combat, I strongly recommend against crawling towards your teammates as that tells the enemy where they are or what direction they’re in. Crawl away from them or sit tight, and if someone’s nearby, they’ll be able to catch-up with you easily enough to revive you.

There are times in Factions when you can and should run-and-gun, but Factions is not Call of Duty, Destiny, Gears of War, or similar game. It’s a game of strategy and patience. I’m not an expert on it myself, and I usually die more often than I kill in it, but it’s a game that balances stealth with brutality, teamwork with opportunistic action, strategy with spontaneity.

Accept That Your Teammates Are Idiots

Unless and until proven otherwise, accept and expect that your teammates are complete idiots with one exception: you know them and you’ve been playing with them for a while. Playing with strangers has frequently left me speechless, and not in a good way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve actively gone in the opposite direction of a teammate because he or she decided to run full speed across the map, or walk right past an enemy to try to get a supply crate or help an ally up, just to get downed a moment later. In one game, where my best friend was on the opposing team, in the middle of a mass firefight he retreated from the fire I was pouring his way. I took off after him; so did my three teammates who were firing on the rest of the enemy team, so we all got shot in the back because they all wanted the easy kill — the kill I earned.

Which brings me to another minor irritation, kill theft. While it doesn’t really matter if someone else finishes off a kill you started, it’s something you start to take personally in game. The catharsis of downing an opponent, and then executing them is what mainly makes playing Factions worthwhile. I could make the argument for sharing the kills — all participants in a kill get parts (points), after all — but when your adrenaline is pumping because you just faced a [virtual] life and death encounter and lived to tell the tale, you want your points and you don’t want to share them. But what’s REALLY killer about this, that proves that your teammates are idiots, is when they would rather go for an execution rather than fight another nearby opponent or pick-up (revive) you or another teammate.

Your teammates will also lob nail bombs and Molotovs and smoke bombs on the freshly dead opponent you just killed or, worse, empty rooms. They will anger you in many unique ways. Get used to it; this is the world in which we live and play.

All Weapons Are NOT Created Equal

While there was a large range of weapons in the game to begin with, recent DLC has added some particularly wicked ones including the frontier rifle, tactical shotgun, and crossbow. I have only tinkered with the frontier rifle, but it is just about as deadly as the various sniper and hunting rifles, capable of downing a foe at a long distance in a single hit. The tactical shotgun takes a few hits to down your enemy, however it’s rapid fire enough that you can usually accomplish that up close or at a distance with a few taps. Perhaps the most wicked of all is the purchasable weapon, the crossbow. In the real world, a crossbow is no more or less deadly than a regular bow. In Factions, it probably does just about the same amount of upfront damage as the bow as well, however, it also has a bleed effect that can be just as deadly. When hit by a crossbow bolt, the target starts bleeding out, and if they’re not bandaged within a certain length of time, they will be downed even from a single bolt. As of this time, no other weapon in the game has the bleed effect, so it’s particularly nasty and a little unexpected if you haven’t encountered it before. Even if you have, it can still cause you (or your opponent) to waste time and bandages fighting its effects, effectively removing them from the fight for a short period of time. Being a[n in-game] purchasable weapon, thankfully, players just can’t start the game with it, but have to find or earn enough parts to buy it.

While the bow and shiv are the classic silent weapons in game, a number of weapons have silenced versions that require the use of additional load out points. I highly recommend using the silent or silenced versions of a weapon whenever possible in Factions; unsilenced weapons can generally be heard across much of the map, and certainly give away your location. When used in combination with Covert Training 2 or 3, a silent weapon will keep you off the minimap unless you start running.

More to Come!

This will be a post I update as I come up with or receive tips from you and the gaming community at large. I don’t think there’s a single person playing Factions that doesn’t want a challenge; while we all relish the easy victories, they ultimately are boring. We need new players to be ready for and to inspire us. So get cracking.

Early E3 2012 Impressions


I should actually make this post about my impressions about Sony’s pre-E3 conference this year, but I want to talk about at least one game that had nothing to do with Sony’s conference so I decided to just make this about E3 showings in general… Although I own an Xbox 360, it rarely gets turned on, I just use my PS3 a lot more than the 360 and enjoy it more as well. I’m a PlayStation man, what can I say? Needless to say, I didn’t watch the Microsoft pre-expo conference.

Nonetheless, the game I want to mention that wasn’t covered in Sony’s conference is Dead or Alive 5… I had absolutely no idea until today that it was in the works and I have to confess I’m really excited that it’ll be one the PlayStation after the franchise’s long absence from the platform. I’m even more excited that Team Ninja is responsible for bringing it; although I haven’t had the opportunity to play too many of their games in recent years, I always remember the fun I had with my buddies playing the original Dead or Alive on the original PlayStation! Now, I’ll confess there was the legendary breast physics that drew me to the game at that time and has left a huge impact on me since, but the characters were fun to use, and I’m amazed by the interactive fighting stages in this latest installment! While I’ve mainly been a Street Fighter kind of guy for the last few years, I think DoA 5 will fill that gaping hole that Soul Blade/Edge/Calibur left in me with it’s previous installment: when Soul Calibur V was announced, I found I just had no interest in the series any more. IV let me down that much despite not doing a thing wrong… But, I digress… DoA 5 appears to be the pseudo-3D fighter I’ve been waiting for on PS3, and I’m eagerly awaiting the chance to play it!

Being a Sony guy, I have to confess I was let down by Sony’s conference. The Wonderbook for PS Move is interesting and all, but I wouldn’t have made a fuss about it in today’s conference. Even the audience at the auditorium was less than thrilled by it. Now, I know they were excited because they get to have a tie in with J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore and Harry Potter universe, possibly as an exclusive, via Wonderbook, but frankly, that’s not the sort of announcement that I, as a 40 year old gamer, was looking for. I have the Move, and I’d consider getting the Wonderbook and Book of Spells as something to do with my five year old, but that did not get my heart pumping… Especially when the captions, purposefully or accidentally, indicated that the gameplay was not live and the speaker specifically stated moments later that it was. For me, the demo players looked like they were having difficulty getting the game to do what they wanted, when they wanted, which could very well mean that it was pre-recorded footage that was out of sync with the players demonstrating it on stage. If it was indeed live, then the application (because I wouldn’t really call it a game) was laggy, and it’s still not something that should have been demoed prior to the official start of E3.

There were some games demoed that did get me excited and interested, however. The first is Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls, which, simply put, looks amazing. That alone is nothing out of the ordinary for that studio… I never played Heavy Rain, but every little bit I saw of the game looked amazing, and I regret never having had the money to spare for it. The Kara technology demo was also amazing and I suspect heavily laid the groundwork for Beyond. It’s still way too early to see what Beyond is going to be, but I’ll tell you now that I’m excited about it! I love a game with a great story line, and this is going to be one that has so much to reveal! 15 years in a character’s life?!?! Holy shit! Even more remarkable is that the lovely Ellen Page will be voicing the game’s main character, Jodi Holmes.

I love role playing games as much as I love air, but when I want to truly unwind, I like to kill things in first person shooters. I won’t even begin to cover the FPS games I’ve played, loved, and mastered over the last 20 years, but today’s press conference had me eager to play Ubisoft’s Far Cry 3. This is a franchise I never played beyond a beta or demo, so I don’t know anything about the story line, characters, or quirks that make it any different from any of the others. But the 4 player co-op caught my eye… In some ways, this game’s co-op mode reminds me of Valve’s Left 4 Dead series (the primary reason I bought my 360), and in others it reminds me of Insomniac’s Resistance 2‘s co-op mode. Considering I love both of those games, I got pretty interested in the game play on Far Cry 3 and I could see myself buying the game simply for that if three of my PS3 owning friends also get it… I did a bit of reading on IGN’s web site about what they thought of FC3‘s co-op mode, and it was hardly favorable, but I think it’s something that I’ll keep my eye on. According to IGN, the game is 3 months away from release and they were pessimistic about the chances of it improving before then, but I’ve seen a lot change in a final release in shorter time. Not to mention that the game as it exists at E3 today may very well be weeks or months old code.

There will be those that are extremely excited over God of War: Ascension but I saw it, more or less, as desperation. The God of War series has been an amazing seller for Sony, and it has done some pretty amazing things over all, especially with #3 which included combat on the back of a titan climbing mount Olympus, but this new one really didn’t seem to do anything particularly groundbreaking. Maybe I’m just not that into Kratos and his adventures — as a matter of fact, I’m not, I’d much rather see a follow-up to Heavenly Sword than another God of War entry — but it really looked like Sony decided to make another GoW game to keep money flowing into the coffers while they prep for the next generation. By this point, I was fairly disappointed in Sony for only having one strong, original title in the line up prior to the official start of E3, but then they reminded me of exactly what I needed to be reminded of…

Naughty Dog has been impressing me since the day I bought my PS3. Before then, actually, because I saw video and screenshots of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune long before I had the money to buy my PS3. One of the first games I bought was Uncharted, and I still play it and its sequels on a regular basis! I still haven’t found all of the treasures in any of the three games, and I’m not about to stop looking! (I refuse to use a guide for most games, and especially these.) Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, sadly, felt like a goodbye to me, that Naughty Dog was ready to move on to bigger and better things. If that’s the case, then I can think of nothing more suitable as a follow-up than The Last of Us. There’s no need for me to describe The Last of Us because I’m sure there are a thousand blogs out there doing just that, and a couple hundred game magazines doing the same in print and electronically, but it looks to be just the kind of game I’ve been waiting for. As I watched the demo for the game tonight, I was reminded of playing the original Resident Evil game on my PlayStation back in 96 when I would get creeped out to the point that I couldn’t play the game at night. While Last of Us may or may not involve zombies, genetic engineering gone bad, and betrayal like RE did, it frankly looks like another amazing work of art weaving extreme attention to detail, an engaging and thoughtful storyline, and brutal realism from one of the premiere PlayStation developers. In my humble opinion, this is a game worth buying a PlayStation 3 to play!

Between Beyond and Last of Us, I think Sony could have let a team of monkeys throw poop at the audience and still pulled off a positive conference this evening. The other games didn’t hurt [much at least], but those were the two stars. The PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale looked interesting, and got even better when it was revealed that Nathan Drake (from the aforementioned Uncharted series) and the Big Daddy (from BioShock) were going to be gracing the game as playable characters, but I was unusually uninterested for most of the conference.