[Software]Say goodbye: there will be no multiplayer in The Last of Us

[Dean Ambrose™]

 

It was the "most ambitious project they had ever worked on" (the developer's verbatim words), but it seems in the end they have thrown in the towel and Naughty Dog has officially announced that they will not release a multiplayer mode for The Last of Us. After years of generating excitement, the company has provided a clear reason for this change of plans: they do not want to become an online gaming studio.

"We are aware that many of you have been waiting for news about the project we have been calling The Last of Us Online, so it is not easy to say this: we have made the difficult decision to completely stop development of this game."

The Last of Us will not have multiplayer mode
The truth is that this announcement has been quite a blow to the community, who had literally been waiting for years for the project to see the light of day. Naughty Dog has acknowledged, in fact, that the team destined to create this multiplayer mode has been in the pre-production phase of this game since they began working on The Last of Us Part II, which also means that they had invested millions in it. . And I say, both as a fan and as a professional, that if the reason is that they didn't want to become an online gaming studio... shouldn't they have realized that much earlier?

«During the production process the enormous scope of our ambition became evident. To launch and maintain The Last of Us Online we would have to devote almost all of the studio's resources to supporting post-launch content for years, which would severely impact the development of future single-player games. So we had two paths before us: become a studio dedicated exclusively to online service games or continue to focus on the single-player narrative games that have always defined Naughty Dog's heritage.

It is true that Naughty Dog has always been a studio focused on story-type games, that is, they do not have any multiplayer component, just as it is true that to carry out this it is necessary not only to develop the game for it, but also create and maintain an infrastructure of servers that support it. This means at the same time that, for the game to stay alive, they would have to create a kind of internal ecosystem to make profits and thus maintain the infrastructure... what we all know as micro transactions.

On the other hand, it must also be recognized that in all likelihood many fans of The Last of Us will breathe a sigh of relief upon hearing this news. It would be quite depressing if, of all the studios, Naughty Dog "perverted" itself by becoming just another studio that makes a living off of revenue from a single game, releasing season passes, cosmetics, battle passes. , etc.

In our opinion, this decision is more than respectable and in fact we consider that the frankness of the study should be praised. The only drawback we have is the one we have already mentioned before, and that is that it seems absurd to us that they have decided this when they have been creating expectations and developing it for years... Did they really not think from the beginning that maintaining a multiplayer game has costs?

 

https://hardzone.es/noticias/juegos/multijugador-the-last-of-us/