The Last of Us multiplayer has been canceled

In May this year we reported that the multiplayer game of The Last of Us is facing problems and Naughty Dog It has now been revealed that the game has been cancelled.

First of The Last of Us had a multiplayer mode known as Factionswhich combined the gameplay of The Last of Us with a PvP scenario, creating a brutal online experience different from other games. The Last of Us Part II There was supposed to be a successor like this, but the decision was made to turn it into its own game, which we now know will never see the light of day.

A Naughty Dog published a statement on his blog explaining the difficult decision to cancel the game that was highly anticipated by fans of The Last of Us.

We can read in the statement from Naughty Dog about The Last of Us Online:

We know that many of you are waiting for news about the project we call The Last of Us Online. There’s no easy way to say this: we made the decision incredibly difficult to stop development of this game.

We know this news will be difficult for many, especially our dedicated community of The Last of Us Factions, who has ardently pursued our multiplayer ambitions. We’re equally devastated in the studio as we were eager to get it into your hands. We wanted to share with you some background on how we came to this decision.

The multiplayer team has been in pre-production with this game since we were working on The Last of Us Part II – creating an experience that we consider unique and with tremendous potential. As the multiplayer team iterated on their concept for The Last of Us Online During that time, his vision crystallized, the gameplay became more refined and satisfying, and we were excited about the direction we were taking.

As we accelerated to full production, the enormous scope of our ambition became clear. To launch and support The Last of Us Online, we would have to put all of our studio resources into supporting post-launch content for years to come, severely impacting the development of future single-player games. Therefore, we had two paths ahead: become an exclusively Live game studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that defined the inheritance of Naughty Dog.

We are immensely proud of everyone in the studio who played on this project. The learnings and investments in technology from this game will be taken into consideration in the way we develop our projects and will be invaluable in the direction we are taking as a studio. We have more than one ambitious new single player game what we’re working on here at Naughty Dogand we can’t wait to share more about what’s next when we’re ready.

Until then, we are extremely grateful to our community for their support over the years.