The Last Of Us cancelled game leaves fans heartbroken

I have a very personal stake in this one and I gotta agree - this one hurts, folks.

The Last of Us Part II hit store shelves in June 2020, but partway through its development Naughty Dog decided to strip an element of the game out so they could release it sooner; its planned multiplayer.

Check out our review for The Last Of Us Part II Remastered below

Supposedly, the multiplayer was taken out in a bid to get the game out a little faster after its production ran into delays as a result of the COVID pandemic.

The multiplayer element wasn’t scrapped entirely however, or at least… it wasn’t initially scrapped.

Naughty Dog announced plans to release The Last of Us Online as a separate game, and at one point gameplay of the title even leaked online.

The game was supposedly going to be a live-service title, something akin to a game like Destiny 2.

Unfortunately, back in December 2023 the game was cancelled entirely - as announced on Naughty Dog’s blog.

News of the cancelled game recently found its way back into the public eye, after famed journalist and my personal hero Jason Schreier went on the Skill Up podcast to dish out some new info on the project.

As Jason revealed, the title was in development for roughly four years and, most interestingly, resulted in some firings at Sony following its cancellation.

Some of you may be surprised to learn that The Last of Us Remastered’s online Factions mode still has quite a dedicated playerbase, regularly finding its way into the top 100 most played online games on PlayStation every month.

Personally, it’s one of the only reasons I still bother booting up my PS5 these days. I’m not even really an online shooter kind of guy, but something about the multiplayer just resonated with me immediately.

Factions has remained so popular that its subreddit is still going pretty strong, and its users had a few disappointed words about the re-emergence of the news regarding The Last of Us Online's cancellation.

"Honestly, I still don’t understand why the project couldn’t have been pared down", read one comment, "If you’ve spent 4 years and hundreds of people’s labor on this thing, why not just make a simpler post launch roadmap?"

"Either they had some of the worst leadership and plan for Faction..." read another, "Or they dont tell us the whole picture, hell, the alpha build that got leak of Faction part 2 was insanely similar to part 1 with updated gameplay and features. LITERALLY ALL WE ASKED FOR."

Personally, I am kind of inclined to agree. Not just because I’m disappointed that the game was cancelled in the first place, but also because it seemed that so much money and time had already been poured into the project beforehand.

I know sunk cost fallacy is a thing and Naughty Dog definitely knows better than I ever will, but it just seems like such a waste - especially when the version of Factions we have in the original The Last of Us was already so good.

Here’s hoping it can be repurposed into something, somewhere down the line. Let’s not hold our collective breath though.