The director of The Last of Us multiplayer spinoff has spoken out on the “devastating” impact of its cancellation, which he only found out about 24 hours before Sony made it public.
Naughty Dog stopped development on The Last of Us Online in December 2023, saying it would have needed to put all its resources into post-launch content for years to come — an approach that would have severely impacted its ability to develop future single-player games, including what we now know is Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
Vinit Agarwal was game director on The Last of Us Online, having joined Naughty Dog back in 2014. He worked on the game for nearly seven years, from 2016 to 2023, when production was shut down. Afterwards, he left Naughty Dog to start up his own game development studio based in Japan.
In an interview with the Lance E. Lee Podcast from Tokyo, Agarwal spoke openly about why The Last of Us Online was canceled despite being “very very close to done,” blaming it on a combination of factors including the widespread industry pullback following COVID lockdowns, and Sony’s subsequent reassessment of its live service push.
“What happened was, during COVID, the game industry saw a huge growth because everyone was at home,” Agarwal began. “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. We developed it almost to 80% completion. It was very very close to done.
“But then all the forces that pushed the game industry in 2020 were the reasons it started declining in 2022, 2023. So as people returned to the office, suddenly people didn’t have as much time to play games. You know, that spending reduced. 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.”
Naughty Dog had to make a choice between The Last of Us Online and single-player adventure Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Agarwal said. The decision, as we know, was to go with Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
“And so one of the casualties of that was this game I was directing,” he 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.”
At this point Agarwal revealed the true impact The Last of Us Online’s cancelation had on him. He described it as “devastating” and “soul crushing,” not just because of how long he’d worked on it, but because of how he found out about it, and because of how personal the project was for him.
“That was a devastating moment for me, because I spent seven years working on that game. It was soul crushing. 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,” he said.
Warning! Potentially upsetting events are recounted below:
Agarwal went on to explain that with The Last of Us Online, he was trying to recreate the feeling he experienced during a real-life robbery, during which he was held up at gunpoint.
“This was something I really cared about,” he said. “I had a core inspiration for this game that drove what happened in the game. In 2012, I was visiting my friend in Austin, Texas, and I was out late at night with one of my other friends who was also visiting with me. And we’re coming back late at night, and I was on the phone at three in the morning with my girlfriend at the time, and I had a camera hanging from my neck. I was like the ultimate tourist. Two guys show up behind us with shotguns. I turn around and these guys are pointing shotguns at our faces.
“And they’re like, ‘Empty your pockets!’ And my buddy starts running. I look behind me and these guys are pointing shotguns at me, ‘Like, empty your pockets.’ I was an idiot. I was on my phone. I had no clue what was going on. Like, ‘Empty your pockets.’ And I couldn’t quite understand what they’re saying because they had this southern accent.
“So I started running actually, because I don’t know what they want, or I thought they were going to shoot me. So I started running and as I’m running they tripped me with a shotgun like a hockey stick. I fell on my face and they’re like, ‘Empty your f***ing pockets!’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ And I dropped my camera. I dropped my phone. I dropped everything. And they’re like, ‘Get the f**k out of here!’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’ I ran and I found my friend and we flagged down a car and we called the cops, and they couldn’t do anything about it because those guys were already gone.
“It felt like you were going to die. That was a frightening moment. The thing that was sad about it was, these guys were holding up a shotgun for what at the end of the day? They got my wallet that had like 30 bucks in it. You know what ended up happening? They used my credit card once at McDonald’s. Then they tried to use it at Walmart and they got rejected and then they ditched it. And the phone was shattered because I dropped it on the floor. A homeless guy called my brother on my phone and we got my phone back the next day. They tossed it in a dumpster.
“And so what did they really get out of that whole engagement? Maybe like a McDonald’s meal. Really that’s what they got out of that engagement, and yet they did it because they were desperate I presume.”
This, combined with another mugging incident in Brooklyn, formed the “core thesis” of the game Agarwal was building at Naughty Dog.
“I wanted people to get that feeling. It takes place in The Last of Us universe. It was a multiplayer game set in the same universe as The Last of Us. The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic world where people potentially hunt each other for food, for a little bit of supplies. And it’s kind of like what those guys did to me, where they rob me for basically a McDonald’s meal. And so that sense of desperation that comes out of that, and what you’re willing to do when you’re desperate, and the dehumanizing element of it where you’re gonna almost hunt someone like an animal for the scraps. And when they chase you, they’re out for blood. They will chase you to the end of the world to get that food,” he explained.
“The goal of the game was to scavenge supplies, and one of the best sources of supplies is to kill the other player, right? And I remember this experience, I was playing a really early version of the game, and someone was shooting at me and I hid behind a table. And they’re looking for me and they didn’t see me, and they left the room. I reloaded my gun and they hear me reloading my gun, and they come back into the room and then I’m like, s**t, and I jump out the window and they’re chasing me and I’m running through the corridors and stuff like that and I duck in some grass, because it’s an overgrown world because it’s 25 years in the future. And I’m like in the grass hiding and they’re looking for me, and they’re like walking right next to the grass and they can’t see me.
“And it’s this moment I felt of ducking in that stoop and feeling like they’re running around. They’re looking for me and it felt so authentically like that moment. I was like, ‘Wow, this is powerful.’ It was therapy for me.
“It was such a personally meaningful project to me, that it killed me that people couldn’t play it. Despite reaching basically the top of the game industry, being a game director at one of the best game companies in the world, I thought to myself, the only better thing I can do is to make my own company.”
Naughty Dog went on to announce Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet at The Game Awards 2024, its first new franchise in over a decade. Last year, speaking to Sacred Symbols+, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida said feedback from Destiny developer Bungie, which Sony had acquired, helped to convince Naughty Dog to scrap The Last of Us multiplayer.
“The idea for The Last of Us Online came from Naughty Dog and they really wanted to make it,” Yoshida said. “But Bungie explained [to them] what it takes to make live service games, and Naughty Dog realised, ‘Oops, we can’t do that! If we do it, we can’t make Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.’ So that was a lack of foresight.”
This tallies with prior reports that indicated Naughty Dog had scaled back development of The Last of Us Online due to an internal review from Bungie. In October 2023, Naughty Dog reportedly suffered a round of layoffs and that the multiplayer project was “put on ice.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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