The Last of Us Online was the name used by Naughty Dog for its planned standalone multiplayer game set in the world of The Last of Us. It was not released. On December 14, 2023, Naughty Dog announced that it had stopped development, ending a project that had grown out of the multiplayer ambitions previously associated with the series’ Factions mode.
The project’s roots reach back to the original The Last of Us, whose 2013 release included Factions, an online mode in which players aligned with the Hunters or Fireflies and built a survivor clan across twelve-week cycles. Multiplayer had also been planned for The Last of Us Part II. In September 2019, Naughty Dog said that its online component was becoming more ambitious than originally envisioned and would be released separately rather than with Part II.
By June 2022, the studio had publicly described the work as a standalone multiplayer project and said it was its most ambitious undertaking to date. Neil Druckmann, Naughty Dog’s co-president, said the team aimed to deliver “a fresh experience” while remaining faithful to the studio’s “passion for creating incredible stories, characters, and gameplay.” The game was intended to share the universe of The Last of Us, but Naughty Dog never published a full plot, a release date, or a definitive title treatment beyond referring to it as The Last of Us Online.
Its most concrete public image came at Summer Game Fest in June 2023, when Naughty Dog released concept art showing two armed survivors overlooking a ruined, overgrown cityscape. The studio identified the setting as San Francisco. It also said the project would let players experience The Last of Us “in a persistent online world,” while promising more details later.
Later that year, reporting by Bloomberg said Bungie had evaluated the game and raised concerns about its ability to keep players engaged over the long term. Naughty Dog’s cancellation statement did not name Bungie, but explained its own conclusion: becoming a studio devoted to supporting The Last of Us Online after launch would require putting its single-player games on hold. The studio said it faced a choice between becoming “solely a live service games studio” or continuing to focus on the narrative single-player experiences that had defined Naughty Dog’s legacy. It chose the latter. The cancellation left the original Factions as the only released Last of Us multiplayer mode from Naughty Dog.
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