Naughty Dog Says The Last Of Us Multiplayer “Needs More Time,” While Also Admitting To New Single-Player IP

A new report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, a promi­nent jour­nal­ist in the gam­ing indus­try, says Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us stand­alone mul­ti­play­er is cur­rent being “reassessed.” He also states that Naughty Dog has “sig­nif­i­cant­ly scaled down” the team work­ing on the project. This comes from a sources famil­iar with The Last of Us Fac­tions development.

Schreier report­ed the scale back hap­pened dur­ing a recent eval­u­a­tion, say­ing, “While the game hasn’t been can­celled, many of its devel­op­ers have been moved to oth­er projects.” Of course, Naughty Dog tried to head off this report with a state­ment of its own on Twit­ter, explain­ing to fans the game “needs more time.” 

The tweet went on to say that Naughty Dog is also cur­rent­ly work­ing on a “brand-new sin­gle-play­er expe­ri­ence,” and that it would be “shar­ing more soon” about this mys­tery IP. Naughty Dog fin­ished it’s state­ment thank­ing the com­mu­ni­ty for sup­port­ing their games.

The Last of Us Fac­tions missed the PlaySta­tion Show­case this week, and this explains why. Although, accord­ing to Schreier’s report, Bungie “raised ques­tions about the The Last of Us mul­ti­play­er pro­jec­t’s abil­i­ty to keep play­ers engaged for a long peri­od of time, which led to the reassess­ment.” Sony pur­chased Bungie in an effort to help them expe­dite it’s live ser­vices efforts.