Three years after Naughty Dog scrapped its Last Of Us multiplayer game, its director has revealed what went wrong and what he’s making next.
If it weren’t for the catastrophic failure that was Concord, the poster child of Sony’s failed live service game aspirations might have been the cancelled The Last Of Us Online.
Initially meant to just be The Last Of Us Part 2’s multiplayer mode, it evolved into a separate project and would’ve been one of Sony’s biggest live service multiplayer games, only for it to be unceremoniously abandoned in 2023.
Three years later and the project’s director, Vinit Agarwal, has described why it was cancelled, while also revealing that it was upsettingly close to completion before the plug was pulled.
In the most recent episode of the Lance E. Lee podcast, Agarwal talks about his career in game development, which includes his time at Naughty Dog, where he helped spearhead The Last Of Us Online.
He summarises how gaming, especially online multiplayer, saw a huge boom during the coronavirus pandemic; something that led to Sony putting a lot of money into making such games in 2020.
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While it’s been suggested that Naughty Dog actively wanted to make a Last Of Us multiplayer game, as opposed to being ordered to by Sony, Agarwal adds that one of the reasons the studio received funding for the project was because it was the sort of thing Sony had become very interested in.
Then, as you’re no doubt aware, the games industry’s coronavirus induced gains started to dwindle, with things reducing down to where they were before the pandemic. The industry is still suffering the aftereffects of that today and it’s one of the main reasons why studios are constantly trying to cut costs by laying off staff and cancelling games.
‘They overspent, basically, they were overzealous,’ says Agarwal about the industry as a whole, not just Sony.
Tragically, despite the years of silence and no real updates on its progress beyond a few bits of concept art, development on The Last Of Us Online was going well after seven years of work and, according to Agarwal, it was already 80% complete by the time it was decided to abandon it.
Agarwal reiterates the studio’s reasoning for the cancellation, corroborating that it was ultimately Naughty Dog’s decision rather than Sony’s.
Basically, if work was to continue on The Last Of Us Online, that would mean constant post-launch support and no real time to spend on new single-player games, which Agarwal refers to as Naughty Dog’s ‘bread and butter.’
‘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,’ explains Agarwal, presumably referring to the upcoming Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
‘And so… 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.’
It seems Agarwal had no say in the matter as he mentions that he only learned about the project’s cancellation the day before the public announcement. Although why Naughty and Sony didn’t realise this very obvious problem until seven years into the project is a mystery.
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Naughty Dog likely doesn’t regret the decision, since in the intervening years, the live service games space has only continued to struggle.
Not only has Sony yet to land a bona fide hit (it’s too early to tell if the recently launched Marathon has long-term staying power), but newcomers like Highguard have failed to make a dent and even Fortnite hasn’t been turning a profit lately.
Granted, development on Intergalactic has reportedly not been going smoothly either, with a Bloomberg report from December saying that the project’s missed multiple deadlines and insiders stating that it’s not going to launch until 2027 at the earliest.
As for Agarwal, he continued to work on a separate Naughty Dog game (the studio is known to be working on at least one other, unannouced single-player project besides Intergalactic) but eventually left in 2025 and set up his own studio in Japan.
He’s currently working on a game he describes as being influenced by 90s anime, which is interesting since Intergalactic is also drawing some anime influence, but from 80s anime movie Akira and the 90s Cowboy Bebop show.
Agarwal doesn’t name any specific examples of anime he’s using as inspiration, only describing his game as ‘gritty and mature, but stylised,’ which suggests his will have a distinct anime aesthetic whereas Intergalactic, while sci-fi, is aiming for the same sort of photorealism seen in The Last Of Us games.
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