Naughty Dog faces multiplayer petition

A fan petition is the new flashpoint in one of PlayStation’s most stubborn what-if stories. The ask is simple — bring back The Last of Us Online, the multiplayer project Naughty Dog canceled in December 2023. But the reason this is bubbling up now is more interesting than the petition itself. Fans got fresh fuel after former game director Vinit Agarwal said the game was around 80% complete and that ex-colleagues still call it the best multiplayer game they’d played. (gamerant.com) ### What happened this week? A Change.org petition titled “Release The Last of Us Online” went live on April 30 and quickly picked up hundreds of signatures. The petition argues that fans have been asking for a true follow-up to Factions for years and says Sony and Naughty Dog should reconsider shelving the project instead of leaving that demand unanswered. (gamerant.com) ### Why are fans still hung up on Factions? Because Factions was never just a throw-in multiplayer mode. In the original The Last of Us, it built a small but intense community around slow, tense survival gunfights and resource management. When The Last of Us Part II launched without any equivalent mode, a lot of players treated that as a missing piece, not a design choice. (pushsquare.com) ### Why is the petition happening now? Basically, the timing comes from two fresh revelations. Agarwal recently said the canceled game had spent roughly seven years in development and was about 80% done when it was shut down. Then he added that former coworkers still message him about how strong it(pushsquare.com)ke a near-finished game getting buried. (pushsquare.com) ### So why did Naughty Dog cancel it? Naughty Dog’s own explanation in December 2023 was blunt. To launch and support The Last of Us Online at the scale it wanted, the studio would have had to put huge resources into years of post-launch content and operations. The cat(pushsquare.com)es it’s known for. (gamedeveloper.com) ### Where does Bungie fit in? Bungie was brought in to evaluate Sony’s live-service projects, and former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida later said Bungie helped explain what the long-term support burden would really look like. That matters because the issue apparently wasn’t whether the game was fun. By m(gamedeveloper.com)ached to it. (ign.com) ### Does the petition have any real chance? Probably not in the literal sense. Online petitions almost never reverse a canceled AAA project, especially one tied to staffing strategy and years of support costs. But that doesn’t mean it’s (ign.com)le of play. (gamerant.com) ### What does this say about Naughty Dog now? It says the studio is still living with the fallout from choosing focus over expansion. Naughty Dog canceled the multiplayer game so it could keep prioritizing traditional big-budget narrative projects, including Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Fans are effectively saying they understa(gamerant.com) late and too close to the finish line. (pushsquare.com) ### Bottom line The petition probably won’t resurrect The Last of Us Online. But it does sharpen the real sting here — players are no longer mourning a rumor. They’re mourning a game that, turns out, may have been much closer to real than anyone knew. (pushsquare.com)