- The last of us Online Game director Vinit Agarwal said the game was 80% complete before it was canceled.
- He says Naughty Dog must choose between canceling the multiplayer game and Intergalactic: the heretic prophet
- Agarwal learned of the ‘heartbreaking’ news 24 hours before the public
The director of Naughty Dog’s The last of us Online revealed that the multiplayer spinoff was almost finished before being canceled.
In December 2023, news arrived that development of the multiplayer game had stopped, with Naughty Dog explaining at the time that it did not want to “become a live-action-only game studio.”
It was reported that the game had been in development for four years with a team of several hundred people, but the studio felt that keeping a live title alive would take all of its resources away from its other solo projects, including Intergalactic: the heretic prophet.
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Now, speaking at length in a recent interview with Tokyo’s Lance E. Lee Podcast, game director Vinit Agarwal discussed the development process and the circumstances that led to the project’s cancellation.
Agarwal explained that the game received funding due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to global lockdowns and increased public interest in online gaming.
“What happened was during COVID, the gaming industry saw huge growth because everyone was at home,” Agarwal said. “So in 2020, money poured into the video game industry because people were suddenly playing a lot more games because they were at home. What else were they supposed to do?
“Plus, online gaming got a huge boom because people wanted to play with their friends. They couldn’t see their friends, so they had to play online with their friends. So online gaming got a huge bonanza. So Sony decided to invest a lot of money in online gaming like everyone else. And that’s part of why The Last of Us multiplayer I got funding, we took off and we made a lot of progress, and the game was working really well internally. »
Agarwal then dropped a bombshell, revealing that the game was actually 80% complete before Naughty Dog pulled the plug.
“We had it almost 80% developed. It was very, very close to being finished,” he said, explaining that the same forces that boosted the industry in 2020 were the reasons it began to decline in the years that followed.
“As people went back to the office, all of a sudden they didn’t have as much time to play games. You know, those expenses went down,” Agarwal said. “The economy also tanked. And so all this money that flowed into the video game industry wasn’t going to be able to last. Because the money was being withdrawn, they also had to kind of cut back on what they had spent. They basically spent too much. They were overzealous.”
Look on it
This led to a huge problem for Naughty Dog, and the studio was forced to choose between canceling one or the other. The Last of Us Online or his next major solo game, Intergalactic: the heretic prophet.
Of course we know now Intergalactic was saved and the game was officially announced in 2024.
“And so one of the casualties of that was this game that I was running,” Agarwal said. “Basically, at some point a decision had to be made. ‘Okay, make this game or make the next game that Neil Druckmann, the president of the company, was running.’ And so, quite naturally, you can understand what happened there. They had to choose the game that was sort of the soul, the bread and butter of the studio, rather than this experimental game that I was working on that I thought was going to be really big, but unfortunately didn’t see the light of day.
Agarwal then shared how difficult it was to learn of the game’s cancellation, revealing that he found out 24 hours before it was officially announced to the public.
“It was a devastating moment for me, because I spent seven years working on this game. It was heartbreaking,” he said.
“I was the director of the game, and to find out it was canceled 24 hours before it was announced to the public, that’s how I found out the game was canceled, and it was just unfortunate. And they had to do it because they had to control the messaging.”
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