A screenshot from The Last of Us Factions 2, also referred to as The Last of Us Online, has leaked online just after its cancellation. If legitimate, this gives us our first, and perhaps only look, at this lost The Last of Us game, as Naughty Dog pivots back to working on single-player experiences.
It doesn’t give away too many details, as the one screenshot being shared around simply shows us what the main menu could have looked like. Still, it tells us that The Last of Us Factions 2 was fairly far in development when Naughty Dog decided to pull the plug, as the menu looks like what you’d expect from the final game.
This image comes courtesy of insider Dusk Golem, who shared the screenshot on ResetEra. As you can see in the screenshot, The Last of Us Factions 2 had all the markings of a modern-day live service, with a battle pass and an in-game store. There’s also a tab detailing different “jobs”, which might refer to some kind of limited-time challenges, as we see in other service games.
We can’t say exactly how old the image is, or even if this is representative of the game when it was cancelled, but Dusk Golem admits that the screenshot certainly isn’t recent.
“I would’ve never posted this if the game released, but now it’s not coming,” says Dusk Golem. “I’ve had this on hand for a while and it’s just an interesting piece of what could’ve been and some small insight into a project that will never be.”
When announcing the decision to cancel the project, Naughty Dog suggests that it’s moving away from live services for good. In a statement, the studio says that maintaining a multiplayer game would mean abandoning its single-player offerings, unable to juggle both at once.
“To release and support The Last of Us Online we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come […] So, we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games […]”
From this, we can gather that Naughty Dog has an idea of what it wants to work on instead – and that this will be a more traditional offline single-player game. Indeed, while there is disappointment that this TLOU game will never see the light of day, fans are also pleased to see Naughty Dog stick to its roots. We’ll have to wait and see what it’s working on next.
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