The director of the canceled The Last of Us Online has said former colleagues still message him to say it was “the best multiplayer game they’ve ever played.”
Naughty Dog stopped development on The Last of Us Online in December 2023, saying it would have needed to put all its resources into post-launch content for years to come — an approach that would have severely impacted its ability to develop future single-player games including what we now know is Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
Earlier this month, Vinit Agarwal, who was game director on The Last of Us Online, spoke out on the “devastating” impact of its cancelation, which he said he only found out about 24 hours before Sony made it public.
“It’s wild how many of my ex-colleagues still message me today saying how amazing TLOU Online was going to be — still the best multiplayer game they’ve ever played,” Agarwal tweeted over the weekend, as spotted by Eurogamer.
“Never going to let what I work on not see the light of day again. Thank you all for your support and confidence!”
Agarwal joined Naughty Dog in 2014 and worked on The Last of Us Online for nearly seven years, from 2016 to 2023, when production was shut down. Afterwards, he left Naughty Dog to start up his own game development studio based in Japan.
In an interview with the Lance E. Lee Podcast from Tokyo, Agarwal spoke openly about why The Last of Us Online was canceled despite being “very very close to done,” blaming it on a combination of factors including the widespread industry pullback following COVID lockdowns, and Sony’s subsequent reassessment of its live service push.
He also spoke about how The Last of Us Online would have played, explaining that he wanted to recreate the feeling he experienced being mugged.
“I wanted people to get that feeling,” he said. “It takes place in The Last of Us universe. It was a multiplayer game set in the same universe as The Last of Us. The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic world where people potentially hunt each other for food, for a little bit of supplies. And it’s kind of like what those guys did to me, where they rob me for basically a McDonald’s meal. And so that sense of desperation that comes out of that, and what you’re willing to do when you’re desperate, and the dehumanizing element of it where you’re gonna almost hunt someone like an animal for the scraps. And when they chase you, they’re out for blood. They will chase you to the end of the world to get that food.
“The goal of the game was to scavenge supplies, and one of the best sources of supplies is to kill the other player, right? And I remember this experience, I was playing a really early version of the game, and someone was shooting at me and I hid behind a table. And they’re looking for me and they didn’t see me, and they left the room. I reloaded my gun and they hear me reloading my gun, and they come back into the room and then I’m like, s**t, and I jump out the window and they’re chasing me and I’m running through the corridors and stuff like that and I duck in some grass, because it’s an overgrown world because it’s 25 years in the future. And I’m like in the grass hiding and they’re looking for me, and they’re like walking right next to the grass and they can’t see me.
“And it’s this moment I felt of ducking in that stoop and feeling like they’re running around. They’re looking for me and it felt so authentically like that moment. I was like, ‘Wow, this is powerful.’ It was therapy for me.
“It was such a personally meaningful project to me, that it killed me that people couldn’t play it. Despite reaching basically the top of the game industry, being a game director at one of the best game companies in the world, I thought to myself, the only better thing I can do is to make my own company.”
Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida told Sacred Symbols+ last year that feedback from Sony-owned developer Bungie helped to convince Naughty Dog to scrap The Last of Us multiplayer.
“The idea for The Last of Us Online came from Naughty Dog and they really wanted to make it,” Yoshida said. “But Bungie explained [to them] what it takes to make live service games, and Naughty Dog realised, ‘Oops, we can’t do that! If we do it, we can’t make Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.’ So that was a lack of foresight.”
While The Last of Us Online was canceled, there are hints that Naughty Dog may be ready to return to the series for The Last of Us 3. And then there is HBO’s The Last of Us TV series, which is currently shooting its third (and likely last) season.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
