Love it or hate it, there's no denying that The Last of Us 2 is one of the most successful games in recent memory, with its sale numbers smashing records, particularly in the UK. One would think that after such a momentous release, Naughty Dog would want to take a break before tackling another project.
This appears to be far from the case as Naughty Dog has put up several job listings, with one in particular confirming that it is working on a new single-player game.
The listing, which is for a level/environment designer, doesn't provide any other hints as to what this single-player game could be. It's probably too soon to expect it to be The Last of Us 3, as director Neil Druckmann, while not entirely ruling out the possibility, has made it apparent that he has no ideas or plans for it at the moment.
There is always the possibility of it being a new Uncharted game, which could maybe tie-in and/or piggyback off the Uncharted movie that's meant to release next year.
Aside from that, Naughty Dog is also looking for a melee/gameplay animator and a tools programmer, with the latter mentioning that whoever is hired will need to work on "next generation graphics analysis, profiling and debugging tool in conjunction with [...] sister technology groups."
This seems to insinuate that Naughty Dog has already begun working on games for the PlayStation 5, which isn't too surprising given how close the console is to releasing, with it expected to launch by the end of the year.
In the meantime, we still have The Last of Us 2's standalone multiplayer game to look forward to. The Last of Us 2 was meant to feature a multiplayer mode, much like what the first game had, but Naughty Dog opted to cut it due to the ambitions of the main game and time constraints.
Rather than abandon it all together, though, the multiplayer will be distributed as its own thing. At the time of writing, however, we know very little about it, with the main theory being that it will expand and develop what the first game's multiplayer offered.
Whatever the new single-player game is, we probably won't hear or see anything about it from Naughty Dog for a while, especially since it's most likely still very early in development.
Source: GamesRadar