According to a new datamine from YouTuber Specilizer, Naughty Dog’s may have planned to include a battle royale within The Last of Us Part 2’s ill-fated multiplayer. 

The originally planned multiplayer mode for The Last of Us Part 2 was scrapped before the game’s launch in order to properly realise the “most ambitious project Naughty Dog has ever undertaken,” however that doesn’t mean any trace of it was stripped away from the game. 

In a new video from prolific dataminer and YouTuber Specilizer they show some of the assets that had been left in from the planned multiplayer modes, some of which point towards a battle royale mode, which were at the height of fashion back in 2019. 

Pointing towards this possible battle royale mode are props such as an in-game map made of multiple points of interest and singleplayer areas, a “listen mode device” which might have allowed for the use of the game’s listen mode in multiplayer, and multiple backpack and armour models which sadly Specilizer wasn’t able to restore. 

While The Last of Us Part 2’s multiplayer component is dead and gone, it does give us an idea of what Naughty Dog might be planning for the future, as the studio is also working on a standalone multiplayer game, with Naughty Dog having said that “you will eventually experience the fruits of our team’s online ambition, but not as part of The Last of Us Part II.”

With battle royale games still seeing steady popularity, enough to launch games from within them, it’s possible that whenever we see this standalone multiplayer, it too may include a battle royale, as Naughty Dog has the assets for it after all. 

It’s unclear when this standalone multiplayer experience will release, as in the announcement for it Naughty Dog said that “when and where it will be realized is still to be determined.”