Vinit Agarwal, the former director of Naughty Dog's cancelled The Last of Us multiplayer game, said over the weekend that it was "wild" how many of his former colleagues still get in touch to tell him how amazing The Last of Us Online was going to be. He said he would "Never going to let what I work on not see the light of day again."
Agarwal also thanked the Last of Us community for its "support and confidence," adding that the game was "still the best multiplayer game they've ever played." His comments came after he said earlier this month that the online project was about "80 percent" finished when it was cancelled and that he learned of the decision just 24 hours before the public announcement. He said, "It was soul crushing."
The remarks put a fresh spotlight on a project Naughty Dog spent years shaping after first saying in 2019 that its efforts to evolve The Last of Us Part 1's Factions mode had grown beyond an additional mode and would be released separately. The studio had planned to launch a standalone multiplayer game after The Last of Us Part 2 in 2020, later said in May 2023 that more time was needed, and kept saying the game was coming until it was cancelled in December 2023.
That delay and reversal is what still hangs over the story. Agarwal said the timing of the cancellation notice was frustrating because it was a messaging decision, not a reflection of what the team had built, saying, "It was just unfortunate and they had to do that because they have to control the messaging." The question now is not whether the game had momentum — by his account, it did — but whether anything connected to it ever gets released after the shutdown that ended it.
