The Last Of Us Online Director Reveals His New Studio Is Working On A Multiplayer Project

Vinit Agarwal, the director on Naughty Dog’s scrapped The Last of Us Online game, has revealed that his newly-established studio is working on a project described as a cinematic multiplayer game.

Speaking with Game*Spark, Agarwal revealed that the new development studio was co-founded by himself and Joe Pettinati, a former creative director at Naughty Dog, with the aim of creating a project similar to the cancelled online title. Speaking via machine translation, he commented:

Related Content — Upcoming PS5 Games 2025: The Best PS5 Games Coming Soon

My main titles were Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and The Last of Us Part 2. I worked on both multiplayer and single-player. I was mainly in charge of boss battles, and Naughty Dog’s boss battles are generally one-on-one situations. So I wanted players to feel like they were fighting a human player, not an AI, even in single-player.

To be more specific, I worked on the final boss in A Thief’s End and the fight between Ellie and Abby in The Last of Us Part II. I used all my knowledge of multiplayer to create the feeling that you were fighting a human. A big part of what inspired me to [go independent] was seeing the potential in combining Naughty Dog’s specialty, cinematic action, with multiplayer.

Agarwal has revealed that the project has been in the works for a few months at this point, and is described as a “triple-indie” project. Furthermore, while it’s not in a stage ready to be showcased yet, Agarwal has been “playing it with friends every week.”

The Last of Us Online was in development for quite a few years after the release of The Last of Us Part II, and was scrapped by Sony in December 2023. While little on the project was revealed by Naughty Dog, it was widely believed to build on the Factions multiplayer of the original The Last of Us.

Naughty Dog had originally intended to include the multiplayer in The Last of Us Part II, but a year before the game launched the studio revealed that it had decided to cut the online component as it planned on making it a separate project.

[Source – Game*Spark via VGC]