For years, fans of The Last of Us have waited for Naughty Dog to release a promised online multiplayer title, an extension of the original games Factions mode. However, the developer officially confirmed today that The Last of Us Online is no longer in development. According to the company’s announcement, this is due to a limited amount of time and resources, which the company is choosing to put towards other projects.
The announcement reads, “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.”
At 2022’s Summer Game Fest, Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann said that its multiplayer title would have its own story and would be as big or bigger than any of its single-player games. The developer has also revealed a few pieces of concept art for the title, including the one above. It has never given a release window nor shown gameplay for The Last of Us Online. Rumors that the project was in trouble started earlier this year when Naughty Dog revealed that it was delaying its reveal, and Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported the team developing the title had been scaled back.
Naughty Dog confirms that it has more than one single-player title in development, and that the TLOU Online project lessons will “carry into how we develop our projects.” It plans to introduce a roguelike mode into the upcoming The Last of Us Part II Remastered, called No Return.