The Last Of Us Online Team Celebrate Their Time Making The Game
As Masahiro Sakurai recently noted in one of his videos, there are video game projects that get canceled all the time. You often don’t hear about it due to how things are in the gaming industry or because they’re canceled so early into production that it “doesn’t matter” to many that they were canceled in the first place. In the case of The Last Of Us Online, however, it’s a different story. Naughty Dog wasn’t just working on the game, it’s been in the works for years! It started out as an expansion of sorts for their second game but soon became its own property that would stand on its own.
The Last Of Us Online would put you as a survivor in this post-apocalyptic world and have you see how long you could last against other players, clickers, bloaters, and so on. The game may have been intended to be small, but it soon grew so large that “scale creep” helped lead to its demise. Naughty Dog canceled it, and many are sad that they won’t get to try it out. As for the dev team behind it, many went to Twitter to post how they’re sad it’s gone but how much fun they had working on it:
I worked on this from the time I was hired in Feb 2022 until yesterday, it's absolutely been the highlight of my career, and will always be a very special project for me. So it goes.
A sad day, but very bright horizons ahead for sure. https://t.co/WftyptMRC9
It’s never easy to have a game cancelled, but I’m so proud of my studio and everything we accomplished on this project. <3 big shoutout to my combat QA and dialogue teams https://t.co/XHdLHuk1eA
Absolutely gutted. And gutted for all the awesome people I worked with on this.
I learned more on this project than any other in my career and had more fun playing this game than any other MP game
