Naughty Dog are surely one of the more confusing video game developers today. With their President Neil Druckmann looking more like he wants to produce television than focus on game creation. For the past couple of years Naughty Dog has been working on a multiplayer title focused in The Last Of Us universe, but these past couple of months have had players doubting that it would ever see the light of day and their doubts have just been confirmed. Today on their official blog, Naughty Dog confirmed that the multiplayer title has been officially canceled after realizing that it would take all of their creative teams’ unification to work on the game and post-launch content. This as mentioned would have hindered their progress on their other single-player experiences currently being developed.
This news should not be so shocking to fans as the game never got an official update from the developers. Back on The Last Of Us day on September 26th Naughty Dog set up a livestream and had to state a disclaimer beforehand that there would be no news of the multiplayer game’s development. This was accompanied with an interview that Neil Druckmann did with EW magazine back in November when asked about the title, he simply had no comment.
In ramping up to full production, the massive scope of our ambition became clear. To release and support The Last of Us Online we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games. So, we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage. – Naughty Dog Official Blog
Naughty Dog claims that their ambition was just too great for the project going into production. They ended the blog post by mentioning that there are multiple single-player projects currently being worked on that the moment and to stay tuned. Could these be Last Of Us Part 2 DLC, another entry into the Uncharted series, or the rumored new IP? Time will tell but for now, there is just a bitter taste left in everyone’s mouth.