The Last of Us Online director reveals Naughty Dog had to choose between canceling the ‘80%’ completed game and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet — ‘It was soul crushing. To find out that it was getting canceled 24 hours before it was announced’ publicly | Daily Reports Online
- The Last of Us Online game director Vinit Agarwal says the game was 80% complete before it was canceled
- He says Naughty Dog has to choose between canceling the multiplayer game and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet
- Agarwal learned the “soul crushing” news 24 hours before the public did
The director of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Online has revealed that the multiplayer spin-off was almost finished before it was canceled.
In December 2023, news arrived that development on the multiplayer game had halted, with Naughty Dog explaining at the time that it didn’t want to “become a solely live service games studio”.
It was reported that the game was in development for four years with a team of hundreds, but the studio felt keeping a live-service title alive would pull all 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 the Lance E. Lee Podcast from Tokyo, game director Vinit Agarwal has discussed the development process and the circumstances leading up to the project’s cancellation.
Agarwal explained that the game received funding due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to global lockdowns and an increased public interest in online gaming.
“What happened was, during COVID, the game industry saw a huge growth because everyone was at home,” Agarwal said. “So in 2020, money was flooding into the game industry because people were playing a lot more games all of a sudden because they’re at home. What else did they have to do?
“Not just that, online games specifically saw a huge boost 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 games got a huge boon. So Sony decided to put a lot of money into online gaming like everyone else was. And so that was part of why The Last of Us Multiplayer got funding, and we got off the ground and we made a lot of progress, and the game was doing really, really well internally.”
Agarwal then dropped a bombshell, revealing that the game was actually 80% completed before Naughty Dog pulled the plug.
“We developed it almost to 80% completion. It was very very close to done,” he said, explaining that the same forces that incentivised the industry in 2020 were the reasons it started declining in the years afterward.
“So as people returned to the office, suddenly people didn’t have as much time to play games. You know, that spending reduced,” Agarwal said. “The economy also went down. And so all that money that flooded into the game industry was not going to be able to sustain. Because money was getting pulled out, they had to also kind of collapse the spending they’d spent. They overspent basically. They were overzealous.”
This led to a huge issue for Naughty Dog, and the studio was forced to decide between canceling either The Last of Us Online or its next major single-player game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
Of course, we now know that Intergalactic was saved, and the game went on to get an official announcement in 2024.
“And so one of the casualties of that was this game I was directing,” Agarwal said. “Basically, at one point, 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.’ And so, kind of naturally, you can understand what happened there. They had to pick the game that was kind of the soul, 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.”
Agarwal then shared how difficult it was to learn 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 soul crushing,” he said.
“I was the director of the game, and to find out that it was getting cancelled 24 hours before it was announced to the public — that’s how I found out about the game getting cancelled, and it was just unfortunate. And they had to do that because they had to control the messaging.”
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