Gabriel Stanford-ReisingerFor some years now, Naughty Dog was poised to release The Last of Us Online, an online multiplayer experience set in The Last of Us universe, but it seems that’s dead in the water. We’re not that surprised, from Bungie wanting the project downsized to the middling updates to what was supposed to be the studio’s most ambitious project to date, it’s not hard to see the studio wasn’t all-in or at least the IP didn’t accommodate such a project.
The first-party PlayStation dev posted on its blog about the hard decision. Primarily, the studio blames the upkeep needed to maintain and foster a solid player base within a multiplayer setting. The big kicker was that it would allegedly take all of the studio’s resources to keep the game alive, and it simply didn’t mesh with its ideals, after all it meant that its single-player game development would be affected, too.
While not stated outright, we have a lingering suspicion that some of No Return’s features might hail from The Last of Us Online and that those features were some of the hard-hitting stuff that it hoped would keep the game kicking. It’s too bad that the project is dead, considering the hype and mystique surrounding it, but we’re glad the dev isn’t being forced into the live-service model that Sony so desperately wants to break into.
What do you think? Were you looking forward to The Last of Us Online? Let us know below!
