It’s been just under three years since Naughty Dog announced it was canceling a planned Last of Us multiplayer game in order to redirect resources to its signature single-player narrative games, including the upcoming PS5 game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. From the sound of it, the multiplayer game was in the late stages of development when the studio pulled the plug.
Vinit Agarwal, the director on the project who has since left Naughty Dog and moved to Japan to found a new studio, sat down for a lengthy interview with Lance E. Lee to talk about his life and career. When the topic of The Last of Us Online came up, Agarwal revealed that the game was around “80 percent” complete before it was canceled.
Agarwal also gave some insights into Sony’s misguided live-service pivot, which he says the company started pushing around 2020 at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic as online games became a way for people to connect with their friends while quarantined in their homes. As restrictions have loosened in the years that followed, people aren’t playing online games as much as they were, and as such, all that investment into forever games was pulled back. The combination of that and a weighing of Naughty Dog’s internal resources led to the Last of Us Online cancellation.
Basically, at one point, a decision had to be made. ‘Okay, make this game or make the next game that Neil Druckmann was directing, the president of the company.’ And so, kind of naturally, you can understand what happened there. They had to pick the game that was kind of the bread and butter of the studio rather than this experimental game that I was working on that I believe was going to be really big, but unfortunately couldn’t see the light of day. That was a devastating moment for me because I spent seven years working on that game and it was soul-crushing. I remember honestly finding out that it was getting cancelled 24 hours before it was announced to the public. That’s how I found out about the game getting cancelled and it was just unfortunate and they had to do that because they have to control the messaging.
For now, Naughty Dog is working on Intergalactic, but Druckmann keeps teasing that there is more Last of Us coming down the line. It’s been six years since The Last of Us Part II, which is nearly as long as it was between the first and second game. I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see this hypothetical Last Of Us Part III until sometime in the 2030s on the PlayStation 6.