A Near-Finished Game, Pulled Overnight
Vinit Agarwal says he learned The Last of Us Online was canceled just 24 hours before the public did — after nearly seven years of work and with the project "almost to 80% completion." Speaking on the Lance E. Lee Podcast from Tokyo, the former Naughty Dog game director called the decision "devastating" and "soul crushing," adding, "It killed me that people couldn't play it."
Agarwal joined Naughty Dog in 2014 and led the studio’s multiplayer spinoff from 2016 until production was shut down in late 2023. Naughty Dog announced the cancelation that December, explaining the game would have required the studio to pour resources into post-launch support for years, which "would have severely impacted" its ability to make future single-player games — including what we now know as Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
"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," Agarwal said. "They had to do that because they had to control the messaging."
COVID Boom, Live-Service Bust
According to Agarwal, the project’s trajectory mirrored the industry’s whiplash during and after COVID lockdowns. "In 2020, money was flooding into the game industry because people were playing a lot more games all of a sudden," he said. Online titles saw a "huge boon" as players sought ways to connect from home, and Sony — like many publishers — pushed hard into live service. That funding helped get The Last of Us Online off the ground, and internally the multiplayer was "doing really, really well."
Then the tide went out. As offices reopened and spending cooled in 2022 and 2023, companies pulled back. "They overspent basically. They were overzealous," Agarwal said, describing how the same forces that inflated budgets forced a contraction later. Amid that reassessment, Sony scaled down its live-service ambitions, and the multiplayer TLOU became a casualty.
Picking Druckmann’s Next Game Over Multiplayer
Agarwal frames the final call as a choice inside Naughty Dog: ship the multiplayer or prioritize the studio’s next single-player project led by Neil Druckmann. "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.'" He understood the outcome. "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 aligns with Naughty Dog’s public messaging in December 2023: committing to ongoing updates for a live-service game would have undermined the studio’s ability to build its next story-driven title. The bet went to Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, and Agarwal left shortly after to form a new studio in Japan.
The Game That Might Have Been
What stings most for Agarwal is what he believes players missed. The Last of Us Online aimed to bottle a raw, desperate survival loop, sharpened by personal experience. He recounted being held at gunpoint during a late-night robbery in Austin, Texas, years before he joined Naughty Dog. The encounter, and another mugging in Brooklyn, became the “core thesis” for the game’s design: scarcity that pushes people to hunt each other for scraps, and the dehumanizing edge of doing what you must to eat.
"It takes place in The Last of Us universe," he said. The multiplayer centered on scavenging and risk. Supplies were scarce, and "one of the best sources of supplies is to kill the other player." An early playtest moment sold the idea for him: cornered and reloading behind a table, he gave away his position with a single sound cue. "I'm like, s**t, and I jump out the window and they're chasing me... I duck in some grass... and I'm like in the grass hiding." The tension of being hunted — and choosing when to become the hunter — was the heartbeat.
That focus on sound, visibility, and pursuit sounds right at home in Naughty Dog’s world. Agarwal described a world set decades after the outbreak, overgrown and claustrophobic, where even a reload click could decide a fight. The pitch chased uncomfortable questions: How far do you go when you’re starving? When does survival turn you into prey or predator?
For a project he says was "very very close to done," the scrapping landed hard. Agarwal remains proud of the work and frustrated that players never got to judge it for themselves. But he’s not sitting still. With a new studio underway in Japan, he’s carrying those ideas forward, even if they surface under a different name. If nothing else, the near-miss highlights where Sony and Naughty Dog are placing their chips now — and leaves a what-if hanging over a multiplayer vision we may yet see reborn somewhere else.
