The Last of Us Multiplayer Game Reportedly Facing Major Setbacks

The upcoming multiplayer spin-off of The Last of Us franchise is reportedly experiencing some troublesome development issues at Naughty Dog. The Last of Us is arguably the biggest franchise PlayStation has under its belt due to the renowned status of the two video games, the commercial success of both games and their re-releases, and the recent success of the HBO adaptation. With all of that said, it's been three years since the last brand new game in the series and the studio has been hyping up its fairly ambitious multiplayer centric spin-off which spawned from a scrapped multiplayer mode for The Last of Us Part II. 

After it failed to appear at the PlayStation Showcase this past week, Naughty Dog released an update on social media saying the studio needed more time to work on the game before showing it off to the public. With that said, it seems things may be worse than we thought. A new report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, one of the most reputable sources for behind the scenes stories on games, notes the multiplayer Last of Us game has been "scaled back" with team members being moved to other projects within Naughty Dog. A recent evaluation from higher-ups at the studio has resulted in the game's development slowing down and now a smaller team is essentially keeping it on life support while a decision is made on the future of the project. Bungie, the team behind Destiny, was reportedly brought in to evaluate Sony's live service portfolio following the studio being acquired last year. Bungie raised questions about the long term potential of this Last of Us project. Jeff Grubb also corroborated reports of the game's troublesome development.

All I've heard about this game is that it looks a lot like a studio's first live-service game, and that Naughty Dog wanted to do things its way, which maybe didn't bode well for Factions. https://t.co/sTnMRAQ652

— Grubb (@JeffGrubb) May 26, 2023

As of right now, we have no idea what will come of this. It's possible that the project could be canceled, especially since four years of time and money have been invested into this and it may take much longer to get it into a place that Sony is happy with. Naughty Dog is already working on at least one other single player game, so it's possible this team could be placed on that project.

Do you want to see the multiplayer Last of Us game? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.