It has been since 2020 that Naughty Dog last put out an all-new game. The Last of Us Online explains much of that drought.
Jason Schreier says the canceled multiplayer game was never the stopgap that fans assumed. Its purpose wasn’t to keep the team busy while Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet came together. Internally, it was handled as a tentpole release rather than a side project. Schreier claimed that most of the staff currently building Intergalactic only joined after The Last of Us Online was scrapped.
The whole timeline looks different in that light. Intergalactic wasn’t humming along quietly in the background for years while the multiplayer effort absorbed whatever was left over. It’s where everybody landed once those leftovers turned out to be the main course.
The support problem nobody could solve
As previous reporting has laid out, the team ran some uncomfortable numbers deep into development. Launching the multiplayer project wouldn’t have closed out the work — it would have kicked it off.
Live support meant committing resources and time with no end date, and that drain would either slow the single-player games Naughty Dog built its name on or pull focus away from them entirely. So the plug came out.
The release calendar was left with a hole as a result. Nothing new has come out of the studio since The Last of Us Part 2. Several projects are in development at Naughty Dog now, which may keep a gap of that length from repeating.
What we know about Intergalactic, which is close to nothing
Neil Druckmann has headed up Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet for a while now, having picked it up once The Last of Us Part 2 was out the door. Past that, there isn’t much to go on.
Rumors point to a possible launch next year, perhaps timed to the PS6, though none of that is confirmed. Speculation about the studio’s other games has centered on Uncharted 5 or The Last of Us Part 3. Definite answers are probably years away. In the meantime, the studio is hard at work on future projects.
Seven years, 80 percent, gone
This is the detail that still stings. Development began after Naughty Dog stripped multiplayer out of The Last of Us Part 2, the reasoning being that the main game should stay focused on single player while the multiplayer project received more resources of its own.
Seven years went into it. Reports put the cancellation at roughly 80% through development.
Fans took it hard given how close it came to the finish line, and the frustration makes sense. Factions, the multiplayer mode in The Last of Us Part 1, is beloved for its scrappy, brutal combat and a take on PvP unlike anyone else’s. There’s still nothing that feels like it. The hope was that expanding that idea into a full, fleshed-out game could produce something special.
Nobody will ever know for certain. Still, the people who got hands-on with it behind closed doors had nothing but incredible things to say about it.
Perhaps another Last of Us multiplayer game turns up eventually. Don’t count on it.