Despite the cancellation, it seems the studio is still pretty proud of what it achieved with the multiplayer game. For example, technical designer Nathaniel Ferguson described it as the “highlight” of his career thus far. “[The Last of Us Online] will always be a very special project for me,” he wrote on Twitter. “So it goes. A sad day, but very bright horizons ahead for sure.”
Game designer Karl Morley, meanwhile, said he had “more fun playing this game than any other [multiplayer title] before and since”. And dialogue director Kat McNally added: “It’s never easy to have a game cancelled, but I’m so proud of my studio and everything we accomplished on this project. Big shout out to my combat QA and dialogue teams.”
Such positivity around the project begs the question: why did it get cancelled in the first place? Well, from the outside looking in, it seems like Naughty Dog simply overextended itself. The game sounded far too ambitious for its own good, and was probably going to take all of the studio’s resources to support. In that sense, as disappointing as it is, we can understand why it decided to pull the plug.
[source twitter.com, via twitter.com, twitter.com, gamesradar.com]
