The future doesn't look so bright for The Last of Us Online! And for good reason: after announcing in 2021 the development of a multiplayer game around its flagship franchise, Naughty Dog is finally backtracking on this December 15, 2023, explaining in a press release that it is definitively abandoning the development of its multiplayer in favor of future single-player softs."We're aware that many of you have been waiting for news about the project we've been calling The Last of Us Online. There'sno easy way to say this: we've made the incredibly difficult decision to halt development of this game," explains the development studio.
Naughty Dog goes on to elaborate on the decision:"In order to release and support The Last of Us Online, we would have had to put all our studio resources behind supporting post-launch content for years to come, which would severely impact the development of future single-player games. Naughty Dog concludes:"Thus, we had two paths before us: become an exclusively live-action games studio, or continue to focus on the single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog's legacy."
However, the multiplayer soft seemed to be on the right track... Naughty Dog even gave an update at Summer Game Fest 2022. The program included a recruitment ad posted on the studio's Twitter page.
Naughty Dog is hiring across multiple disciplines for the studio's first standalone multiplayer game! Visit https://t.co/xUYV9m8PJF to learn more! pic.twitter.com/ub9hg433po
- Naughty Dog Jobs (@NaughtyDogJobs) August 27, 2021
At Summer Game Fest, a first image of this famous multiplayer game was unveiled, without giving any further information about the game in question, except that it will be independent of previously released software, and much more extensive than the Factions game mode from The Last of Us, released on PS3 in 2013.
The idea is also to"attract new players, while offering a new and exciting challenge to our most seasoned fans", as Rochelle Snyder, Senior Manager Communications at Naughty Dog, explained at the time. She added that more information was expected in 2023.
With regard to the announcement of this multiplayer game, several more or less disguised job offers had been published in advance, as our colleagues at jeuxvidéos.com report, and the source code of the second opus, The Last of Us 2, had been scrutinized by several dataminers, leading them to unearth traces of multiplayer functionalities in the said source code.
Multiplayer will therefore not be included. But fans can rest assured: The Last of Us Part 2 remaster is still scheduled for release on PS5 in January 2024. So get ready!
