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, severely impacting development on future single-player games. 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 that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.
It's good that they didn't bother continuing the project, but I'm surprised it wasn't canceled earlier. ND are clearly a singleplayer studio, and supporting a large scale live service game would need some massive restructuring, all for a game nobody really asked for. Glad they didn't go through with it.
Suppose it just formalized the situation already effectively in place. Bungie giving a thumbs down + major staff loss on a live service is essentially game over.
Glad they didn't double down.
I didn’t even know this was a thing. It would not have been great, and may have been good, but Naughty Dog doesn’t really seem to be in the camp of settling for good
You're probably right that they were going to get sucked into GaaS and ruin it, but the first one was really fun. The frame around it was weird, but the actual modes worked really well with the mechanics.
In my limited memory, it was one of the few third person team based-shooters with good game modes for the medium.
Interrogation was honestly my favorite mode just from all the different ways it could play out with the crafted items and teamplay options. And this was back originally in PS3 era!
Very disappointed that we can't even get something close for modern platforms/PC cause it was one of my go-to MP experiences on console.