Naughty Dog has announced that it has made the decision to stop developing its online The Last Of Us project which officially was known as The Last Of Us Online, and unofficially for fans was a current-gen update for Factions.
“We know this news will be tough for many, especially our dedicated The Last of Us Factions community, who have been following our multiplayer ambitions ardently.” Naught Dog said in its blog post announcing the news.
“We’re equally crushed at the studio as we were looking forward to putting it in your hands. We wanted to share with you some background of how we came to this decision.”
This definitely isn’t what fans were expecting to hear from Naughty Dog, especially since Jim Ryan had seemingly kicked off this coming era of live service titles from PlayStation Studios.
However the writing was almost on the wall, with reports of Naughty Dog scaling down the team working on this multiplayer game and delaying it indefinitely, with the studio saying it needed even more time, while distracting with the fact that a new single-player game is coming.
There was also a rumour that the game was already cancelled back in October, though in November at least it was still being worked on, according to the game’s director.
Considering that, Naughty Dog’s reasoning behind the choice will likely not be too surprising for the studio’s fans, and ultimately is a choice that stays true to how Naughty Dog has historically operated.
It saw its vision for The Last Of Us Online as too ambitious, and understood that if it were to do this properly, it would need to choose between being a studio that makes single-player games, and a studio that updates one massive live service game for years.
“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.”
Considering the studio that Naughty Dog has been since its birth, it’s easy to see why it made this choice, even if it is ultimately an upsetting way to close the chapter entirely on Factions and The Last Of Us having a multiplayer component again.
A minor consolation prize for Naughty Dog fans goes out to the tease at the end of the blog post which reminds us that the studio has “more than one ambitious, brand new single player game that we’re working on,” so we do have those in the horizon.
Hopefully we’ll actually see something new from Naughty Dog very soon.
Until then at least there’s the rougelike No Return mode to look forward to, as something sort of new when The Last Of Us Part II Remastered releases.
Source – [Naughty Dog]
