Upcoming The Last of Us game has officially been cancelled by Naughty Dog
It's a bestselling game that was turned into a hugely successful TV series, but the next game in The Last of Us series won't see the light of day.
The forthcoming project was slated to be an online multiplayer game - which would have been a marked departure from the single-player, story-driven previous editions, the first of which came out in 2013 and the second in 2020.
It was dubbed The Last of Us Online, and fans were particularly looking forward to it because, like Grand Theft Auto Online, it would mean that you could play in an ever-expanding world almost infinitely, without being tied to a storyline.
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"There’s no easy way to say this: We’ve made the incredibly difficult decision to stop development on that game," said the game's developer, Naughty Dog, in a blog post.
"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. We’re equally crushed at the studio as we were looking forward to putting it in your hands."
Naughty Dog said the multiplayer game had been in pre-production ever since they started working on The Last of Us Part II, and the team was initially happy with where it was going.
"In ramping up to full production, the massive scope of our ambition became clear," the blog post read.
"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."
Naughty Dog - which is owned by Sony - has made its name in story-driven, first-person blockbuster games (it's also responsible for the Uncharted franchise), so it essentially wants to stay in that realm, instead of ditching it all to become an online game developer.
It's bad news for anyone who was particularly excited for The Last of Us to go online. It's one of the bestselling games of all time - Game Developer reports the franchise as selling 37 million copies in nine years, as of December 2022. And even more fans have been drawn to the game since HBO released a miniseries based on it earlier this year, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, which currently has a 96% average score on Rotten Tomatoes.
But it's not all bad news for gamers - the devs at behind The Last of Us aren't resting on their laurels, and said: "We have more than one ambitious, brand new single player game that we're working on here at Naughty Dog, and we cannot wait to share more about what comes next when we’re ready."