- the last of us Online Game director Vinit Agarwal says the game was 80% complete before it was cancelled.
- He says Naughty Dog has to choose between canceling the multiplayer game and Intergalactic: the heretic prophet
- Agarwal learned the “crushing” news 24 hours before the public.
The director of Naughty Dog the last of us Online has revealed that the multiplayer spin-off was almost finished before being cancelled.
In December 2023, news came that development of the multiplayer game had stopped, with Naughty Dog explaining at the time that it did not want to “become a live-service-only game studio.”
The game was reportedly in development for four years with a team of hundreds of people, but the studio felt that keeping a live service title alive would take all of its resources away from its other single-player 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 talked about 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 tremendous growth because everyone was at home,” Agarwal said. “So in 2020, money flooded into the gaming industry because suddenly people were playing a lot more games because they were at home. What else did they have to do?
“Not only that, online gaming saw a big boost specifically 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 big boost. So Sony decided to invest a lot of money in online gaming like everyone else. And that was part of why The last of us multiplayer “We got funding, we got off the ground and made a lot of progress, and the game was doing very, very well internally.”
Agarwal then dropped a bombshell, revealing that the game was actually 80% completed before Naughty Dog pulled the plug.
“We got it almost 80% complete. It was very, very close to being finished,” he said, explaining that the same forces that fueled the industry in 2020 were the reasons it began to decline in the years since.
“So when people came back to the office, they suddenly didn’t have as much time to play. You know, that expense went down,” Agarwal said. “The economy also fell. So all that money that flooded into the games industry wasn’t going to be able to sustain itself. Because money was being withdrawn, they also had to collapse the spending they had spent. Basically, they overspent. They were overzealous.”
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This created a big problem for Naughty Dog and the studio was forced to decide whether to cancel or cancel. The last of us online or your next big single-player game, Intergalactic: the heretic prophet.
Of course, now we know that Intergalactic was saved and the game received an official announcement in 2024.
“And one of the casualties of that was the game he was coaching,” Agarwal said. “Basically, at one point, a decision had to be made. ‘Okay, either make this game or make the next game that Neil Druckmann, the president of the company, was directing.’ And then, naturally, you can understand what happened there. They had to choose the game that was kind of the soul, the bread and butter of the studio, instead of this experimental game that they were working on that I think was going to be really big, but unfortunately couldn’t see the light of day.”
Agarwal then shared how difficult it was to find out about the game’s cancellation, revealing that he found out 24 hours before it was formally announced to the public.
“That was a devastating moment for me, because I spent seven years working on that game. It was heartbreaking,” he said.
“I was the director of the game, and to find out that they were canceling it 24 hours before it was announced to the public, that’s how I found out about the cancellation of the game, and it was just unfortunate. And they had to do it because they had to control the messages.”
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