Naughty Dog tried to develop two games at once, but "did not achieve that at all"

The Last of Us 2 developer Naughty Dog has had its struggles adapting to a multi-game development model, according to its co-president.

Speaking to Game Maker's Notebook (transcribed via VGC), Evan Wells said that while the studio has "multiple projects" on the go, "only one [...] is getting the lion's share of focus at any time." He goes on to explain that "we have one [project] and then some that are in pre-production, or maybe just creeping out of pre-production, but will have to wait until the main focus has completed before we move everybody off of that project."

Wells suggests that Naughty Dog has been trying its hand at the approach for some time, stating that "we tried our first major multi-project development with The Last of Us. At the end of Uncharted 2, Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann went off to start designing [that]. They embarked on that and the idea was we would build a team around it and have two teams going at once, and we just did not achieve that at all. The amount of effort that was required to finish Uncharted 3 at the time was stealing resources away from The Last of Us, and we never got to the point where we had two full productions going."

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The interview doesn't touch on what Naughty Dog is working on now, but a recent report suggests that a multiplayer project is in the works (likely The Last of Us 2 multiplayer), and that the studio was helping "supervise" development of a new Uncharted game at Sony Bend, although development on that game has not been confirmed to have left pre-production. 

For more from Sony's first-party studios, here's a list of upcoming PS5 games.