When Naughty Dog gave us another piece of concept art from The Last of Us Multiplayer game in January, we were told that there would be more news about this exciting project later this year. This led many to believe we’d see it in the PlayStation Showcase. That didn’t happen, and now it’s time to talk about why.
naughty dogdiscloseThe Last of Us Multiplayer has been delayed.It’s an interesting statement when we don’t have a release date in the first place, but the reason is that Sony knew Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier was going to make an announcementan articleFelt compelled to say something at the time, reporting that the game had shrunk after a recent internal review. It’s a smart move when Schreier’s report has many questioning whether the game will ever see the light of day. I wouldn’t worry too much about this.
Half a dozen sources I’ve been in regular contact with at Naughty Dog and/or PlayStation Studios all say that, after a couple of upgrades, it’s downsizing due to growing ambition. One of the problems with these ambitions is that they obviously require more resources. That demand has grown to such an extent that it’s already starting to affect other games Naughty Dog is working on these days, including the single-player game mentioned in the Twitter post. This reached a boiling point a few weeks ago, which led to the decision to move a large portion of The Last of Us Multiplayer team over to the more traditional Naughty Dog games in development (no, it wasn’t The Last of Us: Part 3 that went the furthest. 》), while the rest and parts of Bungie evaluate the future direction of instant service games and what to cut/shrink.
Needless to say, this means we can forget about officially seeing or hearing more about The Last of Us Multiplayer this summer. Maybe we get a small update on September’s outbreak day, but that’s about it.
What do you think of it? Is Naughty Dog’s focus on more single-player games a good thing, or do you want to see The Last of Us Multiplayer’s The Division, Fortnite, and STALKER?
