10 Video Games That Just Got Cancelled

Though a multiplayer mode for The Last of Us Part II was announced back in 2018, Naughty Dog ultimately decided to focus on the single-player campaign first and then release the multiplayer title as its own standalone game later on.

Concept art for The Last of Us Online was first released in June 2022, with franchise co-creator Neil Druckmann promising a game as large as the single-player titles, with an enticing new location widely rumoured to be San Francisco.

By last May, Bloomberg reported that Naughty Dog had scaled back development amid concerns over the game's ability to retain a player-base, followed by a Kotaku report indicating the project was basically "on ice" by October.

Rather than let rumour linger on much longer, though, Naughty Dog themselves confirmed last December that The Last of Us Online had been cancelled, citing the game's ambitious scale as requiring them to pull resources away from their single-played projects - something they didn't want to do.

While it's a shame that the game will never materialise, it's a totally understandable decision for a studio which has made their name on delivering uncompromising and peerlessly cinematic blockbuster experiences. 

To sacrifice all of that for a live-service multiplayer Last of Us game would've been a pure tragedy.