The Last of Us Online: Leaked Main Menu and Features Revealed
A leaked screenshot from The Last of Us Online has revealed its main menu and several features that the developers had in store for the recently scrapped project. The cancellation of The Last of Us Online came as a major disappointment to the fandom, especially considering the game's long development history and the exciting features it was set to offer.
The Last of Us Online Cancellation
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.
Ellie loooking at The Last of Us Online mockup logo
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.
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.
Leaked Features of The Last of Us Online
The leaked screenshot from The Last of Us Online unveiled a range of features that the canceled project was set to offer. Notably, the main menu revealed the existence of a Battle Pass tab, indicating that Naughty Dog was planning to adopt a tiered progression system for monetizing the game.
The features included in the leaked screenshot are as follows:
- 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.
Future Implications and Speculations
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.
