Naughty Dog hasn’t shipped a brand new game since 2020. The Last of Us Online is a big reason why.
According to Jason Schreier, the canceled multiplayer game was never the placeholder people assumed it was. It wasn’t buying the team time until Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet arrived. The studio treated it as a major release, not a side project. Schreier claimed that the majority of the team now working on Intergalactic came over only after The Last of Us Online was scrapped.
That reframes the entire timeline. Intergalactic isn’t a project that quietly ran in parallel for years while multiplayer soaked up the leftovers. It’s what happened to everyone once the leftovers turned out to be the main course.
The support problem nobody could solve
As has been reported before, the team started doing uncomfortable math late in development. Shipping the multiplayer project wouldn’t be the end of the work. It would be the start of it.
Live support meant resources and time, indefinitely, and that pull would slow down or siphon attention from the single-player games Naughty Dog is actually known for. So the plug came out.
And that left a hole in the release calendar. There hasn’t been a new title from the studio since The Last of Us Part 2. Naughty Dog has multiple projects in the works now, which may prevent a gap that size from happening again.
What we know about Intergalactic, which is close to nothing
Neil Druckmann has been leading Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet for some time, starting after The Last of Us Part 2 shipped. Beyond that, the details are thin.
It’s rumored to possibly release next year, potentially lining up with the PS6, but nothing has been confirmed. Some speculate the studio’s other games could be Uncharted 5 or The Last of Us Part 3. It will likely be years before anyone gets definite answers. The studio is hard at work on future projects in the meantime.
Seven years, 80 percent, gone
Here’s the part that still stings. The game went into development after Naughty Dog cut multiplayer from The Last of Us Part 2, on the logic that the main game should focus on single player while the multiplayer project got more resources of its own.
The team spent seven years on it. The plug was reportedly pulled about 80% through development.
Fans were disappointed it died that close to the finish line, and you can see why. Factions, the multiplayer mode in The Last of Us Part 1, is cherished for its brutal, scrappy combat and its unusual approach to PvP. Nothing else plays quite like it. The hope was that building a full game around that idea and fleshing it out could turn into something special.
We’ll never know for sure. But the people who played it behind closed doors had nothing but incredible things to say about it.
Maybe another Last of Us multiplayer game shows up someday. It seems unlikely.
