When Naughty Dog gave us another piece of concept art from the The Last of Us multiplayer game back in January, we were told to expect more news about the exciting project later this year. This lead many to believe we'd see it in the PlayStation Showcase. That didn't happen, and now it's time to talk about why.
Naughty Dog reveals that The Last of Us Multiplayer has been delayed . An interesting statement to make when we didn't have a release date in the first place, but the reason for this is that Sony kind of felt forced to say something when they knew Bloomberg's Jason Schreier was going to publish an article reporting that the game has been scaled down after the most recent internal evaluation. A smart move when Schreier's report made many question if the game would ever see the light of day. I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Six sources I'm in frequent contact with at Naughty Dog and/or PlayStation Studios all say the downscaling comes after several upscalings because of increasingly higher ambitions. One of the problems with those ambitions is that they obviously required more resources. That demand grew to such an extent that it had started affecting the other games Naughty Dog is working on these days, including the single-player game mentioned in the Twitter post. This reached a boiling point a few weeks ago, which lead to the decision to move a significant portion of the The Last of Us Multiplayer team over to more traditional Naughty Dog games in development (no, the one furthest along isn't The Last of Us: Part III) while the ones remaining and parts of Bungie evaluate the live service game's future direction and what to cut/scale down.
Needless to say, this means we can forget about seeing or hearing anything more about The Last of Us Multiplayer officially this summer. Maybe we get a small update on Outbreak Day in September, but that's it.
What do you think about this? Is it a good thing that Naughty Dog turns it focus to more single-player games or would you like to see The Last of Us Multiplayer's mix of The Division, Fortnite and S.T.A.L.K.E.R?