Naughty Dog’s multiplayer set in The Last of Us world is now a canceled project. The studio announced last night that they have “made the difficult decision to halt development” of what we all know as The Last of Us Online.
The Last of Us Online was supposed to be presented to the public this year. The studio had released a handful of conceptual art pieces for the game, but never showcased its gameplay.
“We know that this news will be tough for many, especially for our dedicated community of The Last of Us Factions, who have passionately followed our multiplayer ambitions,” the studio said in a post on its website. “At the studio, we are just as devastated as we were looking forward to putting it in your hands.”
They had been three years in development
Naughty Dog said that the studio’s developers had been in pre-production of The Last of Us Online since the development of The Last of Us Part 2, which was released in 2020.
The online game was “unique and had tremendous potential,” the studio said, but it was also an enormous task that they didn’t have the resources to dedicate to.
“Upon reaching the full production phase, the enormous scope of our ambition became clear,” the developer explained. “To launch and maintain The Last of Us Online, we would have to dedicate all of our studio’s resources to supporting post-launch content for years, which would severely impact the development of future games. So we had two paths before us: become a studio exclusively focused on live service games or continue to focus on the narrative-driven single-player games that have defined Naughty Dog’s legacy.”
The good news: there are new projects from Naughty Dog
Naughty Dog is working on a new single-player game; the studio announced this project in May, when they told fans that The Last of Us Online needed more development time. The studio also plans to release The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered for PlayStation 5 in January.
Naughty Dog already stated in 2018 that they planned to offer a multiplayer component for The Last of Us Part 2, a game that was first announced in 2016.
The original The Last of Us was released with a multiplayer component back in 2013, which was also available in the PlayStation 4 version, The Last of Us Remastered. The TLOU Factions mode used the deathmatch and team deathmatch game types found in many multiplayer games, and added a metagame and a story to it.
