Naughty Dog employees have shared a small tease of their upcoming game. Based on what we publicly know, this game is most likely to be the long in development The Last of Us Multiplayer.
On Twitter, Maksym Zhuravlov, who lists himself as lead animator for “The Last of Us online project”, shared a video showing the animations for Ellie in The Last Of Us 2. He captioned the video saying this:
“I remember when I finished the anim system for TLOU2 combat doors, I thought “Maybe much. But it’s all done now. We have it and we gonna reuse it forever. Cause like what more one can possibly desire from this damned door? Right?“.
Oh boy
WAS. I. WRONG.”
His tweet was then quote tweeted by Naughty Dog co-director Vinit Agarwal, who said this in turn:
“Working on doors in our current game and yes, @MaksZhuravlov was wrong unfortunately.”
So let’s get something clear. The video we have embedded is from The Last of Us 2, which already released. The very very small tease we got was from Vinit Agarwal, who stated that they are working on this same game design element on their next game.
So how are we sure Vinit is talking about The Last of Us Multiplayer? That’s because Naughty Dog already officially confirmed it in a blog post all the way back in September 2021. They have not revealed any other in-house game projects since then.
In fact, Neil Druckmann, who is now busy as co-showrunner of The Last of Us HBO TV show, stated in an interview last January that The Last of Us Multiplayer is the company’s most ambitious project to date.
So, it’s bigger than their first two The Last of Us games, bigger than the Uncharted games, even bigger than Way of the Warrior.
Now, we need to make a clarification regarding this multiplayer game. The 2013 release of The Last of Us on the PlayStation 3 did ship with a multiplayer mode, titled Factions. It servers were closed in 2019. For the 2020 release of The Last of Us 2 on PlayStation 5, there was going to be a multiplayer mode as well, but Naughty Dog made the call to release the single player mode first, and eventually to spin this title off into its own game. This new The Last Of Us Multiplayer will be a sequel to
Naughty Dog made their first mention of The Last Of Us Multiplayer in 2018, so this project has been in the works for possibly five years. That timeframe may be truncated further because of the effects of the pandemic, and also because they may have still just stated planning this mode in 2013’s Factions.
This tweet suggests that in spite of the time passed, Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Multiplayer game may still be a few years away. If this game turns out to be a live service game, it may take even longer. Given Naughty Dog’s pedigree, they will make sure that the wait is worth it for their fans, but for now, we have to be a patient for a few years more.
