Highlights

  • An image from The Last of Us Online was leaked by industry insider Dusk Golem.
  • The screenshot confirms a number of features that Naughty Dog had in store for the scrapped game, including a battle pass-based progression system and a battle royale mode.
  • Naughty Dog officially canceled The Last of Us Online earlier this week.

A reputable industry insider leaked a screenshot from The Last of Us Online, revealing its main menu and several features that the developers had in store for the recently scrapped project. Naughty Dog officially canceled The Last of Us Online on December 14, citing a desire to avoid going all-in on live service games.

The cancelation came as a major disappointment to the fandom, not least because The Last of Us Online had been in development for years prior to being canned. The game was initially envisioned as a multiplayer component of The Last of Us 2, but ended up being spun off into a standalone experience circa 2019. Naughty Dog finally confirmed that The Last of Us Online was in development in summer 2022, only to scrap the game a year and a half later.

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Following the news of the project's cancellation, known industry insider Dusk Golem took to the ResetEra forums to share an image from The Last of Us Online that they "had lying around." The leaked screenshot depicts the game's main menu, which itself reveals several previously unconfirmed details about the canceled project. E.g., the BattlePass tab near the top of the screen indicates that Naughty Dog was planning to adopt a tiered progression system pioneered by the likes of DotA 2 and Fortnite for monetizing the game.

The Last of Us Online Leaked Features

Ellie loooking at The Last of Us Online mockup logo
  • Battle Pass progression.
  • Battle Royale mode called Survivor Solos.
  • Bunk (presumably an armory).
  • In-game item store.
  • Jobs Board.
  • Study.
  • Seasonal content.

The Last of Us Online also had at least one kind of in-game currency and a digital store, the screenshot reveals. Seasonal content would have been part of the package as well, together with a feature called Bunk that might have been the game's take on the Fortnite Armory. The leak also substantiated the long-standing rumor that The Last of Us Online had a battle royale mode, which was apparently called Survivor Solos during development.

The multiplayer Factions mode from The Last of Us was also expected to make a return in the canceled game, although its existence hasn't been explicitly confirmed by this newly emerged image. What the screenshot did reveal was that The Last of Us Online had a Jobs Board—which presumably offered limited-time quests—and a menu feature called Study, which was possibly tied to character customization and progression, much like Bunk.

Given how many resources were poured into The Last of Us Online prior to its cancelation, it is possible that the developer will attempt to repurpose some of its systems in its future titles. There are already several such unannounced Naughty Dog games in the works, although all of them are of the single-player variety, making major feature exchange between them and TLOU Online somewhat less likely.