Last of Us Online live game was 80% done, says ex-Naughty Dog dev who worked on project for 7 years

Naughty Dog director Vinit Agarwal shares rare candid info on the cancelled Last of Us multiplayer online game, saying that the project had been in development for the better part of a decade before it was scrapped.

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In late 2023, Sony and Naughty Dog made the surprise decision to cancel one of the more anticipated games in PlayStation's live service roadmap: A standalone multiplayer game set in The Last of Us universe, with holdovers from the original game's Factions mode. Naughty Dog explained the rationale for the cancellation, saying that it would have required the studio to "put all our resources" into post-release content to feed the game.

Now in a recent interview with the Lance E. Podcast from Tokyo, former Naughty Dog developer and Last of Us Online game director Vinit Agarwal highlights the "soul-crushing"experience of having his dream game cancelled.

Agarwal starts out by saying Last of Us Online had been in the works since around 2016, meaning the game had been in development for 7 years or so.

"I got to direct my own game, I was working on The Last of Us multiplayer--a standalone Last of Us multiplayer game. I worked on that game for nearly 7 years. I worked on it from 2016 roughly to 2023."

The dev underlines Sony's push into live service games under then-PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan. The original plan was to release 12 live games by March 31, 2026, and that plan was reduced to just 6 games before being whittled down to the smaller slate that now includes recently-released games like Marathon.

"During COVID, Sony, along with all the other companies, decided to put a lot of money into online gaming."

The project was quite close to being finished, but was never released to the public. As Naughty Dog had said before, this would have kicked off the real start of the journey, as release is only just the beginning for live service titles.

"So that's part of why The Last of Us multiplayer got funded, and we got off the ground and the game was making a lot of progress. We were doing really, really well internally. We developed it to almost 80% completion, it was very, very close to being done."

Now after funding the game, and 7 years of work, Sony and Naughty Dog had to scale back. It was either fund Last of Us Online or Neil Druckmann's new game, which turned out to be Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

Sony chose Intergalactic.

"They overspent. They were overzealous," Agarwal said.

"One of the casualties of that was this game I was doing. Basically, at one point, a decision had to be made: make this game, or make the next game that Neil Druckmann, the president of the company, was directing.

"Naturally, you can understand what happened there,"he said, pointing to the fact that Druckmann had significant sway to call the shots.

Then Agarwal discussed what it was like to find out his project had been cancelled. He had been told 24 hours prior to Naughty Dog's announcement at the big Summer Game Fest 2022 showcase.

"They had to pick the game that was the sole bread and butter of the studio rather than this experimental game that I was working on--that I believe was going to be very big."

"But unfortunately it couldn't see the light of day. That was a devastating moment for me. I spent 7 years working on that game. It was soul-crushing. I remember finding out that it was cancelled 24 hours before it was going to be revealed to the public. That's how I found out about the game getting cancelled.

"They have to do that because they have to control the messaging."