The Last of Us Multiplayer Game Director Shares Hopeful New Update

The director of Naughty Dog's upcoming multiplayer game set within the world of The Last of Us has shared a hopeful new update on the project. In recent months, news tied to Naughty Dog's untitled multiplayer game has been quite grim. Originally planned to have been shown off to the public in 2023, reports in the first half of the year indicated that this new The Last of Us title was in a lot of trouble internally. In short, the game was said to not be coming together in the way that PlayStation hoped it would, which led to the team working on the project at Naughty Dog scaling down drastically. Fortunately, work on the game doesn't seem to have been outright canceled yet, which has been a lingering fear for many fans. 

In a new message on social media, Vinit Agarwal, the game director at Naughty Dog on this upcoming The Last of Us multiplayer title, broadly confirmed that it's still in active development. Agarwal didn't say anything extensive about the title and its current status, but he told fans that he's "still working on that game" as part of a footnote in a tweet. At the very least, this now confirms that Naughty Dog hasn't shuttered development completely, which means that it could still see the light of day. 

Assuming that this anticipated The Last of Us project does eventually release, the big question at the moment comes with when it would be revealed to the public. Originally, this multiplayer spin-off was meant to arrive as a separate game mode with The Last of Us Part II back in 2020. As the mode's scope grew, though, Naughty Dog opted to make it its own standalone title instead. Now, to hear that Naughty Dog has scaled down its work on the title suggests that the game itself could be shrinking in scale. As such, if The Last of Us Part III ends up releasing in the future as multiple reports have indicated, maybe this individual multiplayer game will just get folded into that entry. 

Do you still expect this The Last of Us multiplayer game to one day launch on PlayStation 5? And if so, when do you think that those at Naughty Dog and PlayStation will finally look to show it off? Let me know either down in the comments or hit me up on social media at @MooreMan12.