The Last Of Us Online Director Says The Project Was About 80% Complete When It Was Scrapped

Naughty Dog‘s cancelled The Last of Us Online project was roughly “80 percent” complete when Sony pulled the plug on the project, its former director has revealed.

Speaking with Lance E. Lee about his career and life, Vinit Agarwal also touched on Sony’s live-service push, which he says came into effect around the time of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. This was obviously a time when people played a lot of games online to connect with others during the lockdown, although in the years after the COVID-19 pandemic things have obviously changed.

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 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.

That was a devastating moment for me because I spent seven years working on that game and it was soul-crushing. I remember honestly finding 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 have to control the messaging.

Agarwal revealed back in July last year that he had formed a new development team based in Japan, and later confirmed that the studio is working on a cinematic multiplayer game. Naughty Dog is currently working on a brand new IP in the form of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which is being headed by Neil Druckmann.

While it remains to be seen if there will be more from The Last of Us, Druckmann spark hope earlier this week when he said there’s “a few stops that remain on the road ahead.” Whether this means the third season of The Last of Us on HBO or a new video game project remains to be seen.

[Source – Lance E. Lee on YouTube via Kotaku]