Former director of The Last of Us multiplayer game has claimed the cancelled online project was roughly “80 percent” finished when it was cancelled.
In an interview in Lance E. Lee’s LelPodcast, Vinit Agarwal spoke about the game’s end. Speaking about the games industry during COVID, where online games saw a boost in players, Agarwal said Sony put a lot of money into Online games including The Last of Us multiplayer. He claims the game was “doing really really well internally”, and the team “developed it to 80 percent completion”.
However, as Agarwal would go on to explain, “all the forces that pushed the games industry in 2020 were the reasons it started declining in 2022 – 2023”. As people returned to the office, spending reduced. As Agarwal put it, “all the money that went into the industry, was not able to sustain. Because money was being pulled out, they had to also collapse the spending. It collapsed, basically. Overzealous”.
The Last of Us Multiplayer was one such casualty. Agarwal said: “A decision had to be made. Make this game, or make this next game that Neil Druckmann was directing, the president of the company. So, kind of naturally, you can understand what happened there. They had to pick the game which was the soul bread-and-butter of the studio, rather than this experimental game I was working on. I believe it was going to be really big, but unfortunately couldn’t see the light of day.”
Agarwal describes this as a “devestating moment”, as he had spent seven years working on the cancelled game. “It was soul crushing. To find out it was getting cancelled 24 hours before [the cancellation] was announced to the public, that’s how I found out the game was being cancelled. It was just unfortunate and they had to do that because they have to control the messaging.” When asked if this hurt more than being walked out of the office when Agarwal was let go, he says it was “10 times more”.
Following the game’s cancellation, reports came out which claimed this decision wasn’t a “bloodless endeavor”, and there were some “Heads rolling at Sony for that one”. Naughty Dog is now working on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which Druckmann has said is the studio’s most expansive and expensive game. He’s also said the studio is working on another game alongside this big AAA release, though what exactly this is remains a mystery.