New details about what happened to The Last of Us multiplayer game that never was have emerged, thanks to a former Naughty Dog developer who worked on it.
Speaking to podcaster Lance E. Lee (via Kotaku), developer Vinit Agarwal said that the canceled Last of Us live-service title was almost at “80% completion,” adding that the game was “very, very close to done.” Agarwal, who had worked on Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and The Last of Us Part 2, was the game director for this multiplayer game.
According to Agarwal, Sony had invested in the project after an uptick in online gaming in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. He added that The Last of Us online title “made a lot of progress, and the game was doing really, really well internally.” Studio head and The Last of Us creator Neil Druckmann even called the game Naughty Dog’s “most ambitious project” back in January 2023.
But Agarwal said that resources for the game were pulled back as COVID-related restrictions loosened and people resumed in-office work. Eventually, Naughty Dog had to choose between the online title or “the next game that Neil Druckmann was directing.” The online game was canceled in December 2023, with the studio saying that post-release support would “severely [impact] development on future single-player games.”
“That was a devastating moment for me because I spent seven years working on that game and it was soul-crushing,” Agarwal said, who added that he only found out about his game’s cancellation 24 hours before Naughty Dog’s announcement. Agarwal left Naughty Dog in January 2025 and moved to Japan to form his own studio.
Naughty Dog has the Druckmann-led Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet lined up for a PlayStation 5 release, though some believe Druckmann may have teased a new Last of Us game in a recent Instagram post.