UPDATE
How do you feel about the cancelation of the game knowing what the dev team felt about it? Let us know below!
ORIGINAL STORY
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:
Now, some might feel that this is an “obvious statement” or “attempt to get sympathy” as they lost a chance to make money and have their works released. But it’s more nuanced than that. Remember that this game was in the works for four years. That meant that some people had been working on developing it and then playtesting it for a long time.
That’s a lot of time and effort to put into something, only for it never to see the light of day. So, for these team members and others within Naughty Dog, this was a sad day. But they’ll attempt to remember the good times.
But why did the game fail outside of scale creep? Well, Naughty Dog isn’t a “live service studio,” as it prefers to make single-player titles. But to make something like this online game, they would’ve had to dedicate a large number of their staff to patches, updates, expansions within the multiplayer space, and more. That would’ve taken plenty of time and resources and cost them a lot of money.
Plus, some people wondered if people would even play the game for a long time and spend money on it. Sadly, we’ll never know the true answer to that.
