More than two years have passed since the announcement, yet many players still wince at the idea that PlayStation spent time, money, and resources on The Last of Us: Online, only to cancel it before the finish line. Vinit Agarwal, the project’s director, has now revealed that the game was around 80% complete when Sony decided to pull the plug.

Agarwal shared the detail on Lance E. Lee’s YouTube channel while reflecting on his years at Naughty Dog. He explained that the multiplayer project received a major financial push during the COVID era, when lockdowns and movement restrictions drove more people toward games and online experiences. “Sony decided to invest heavily in online gaming, like everybody else was doing at the time,” the developer said. “That was part of the reason why The Last of Us multiplayer got funded, why we were able to get it fully running, and why we made so much progress. The game was doing very, very well internally. We got to almost 80% development. It was very, very close to being finished.”

Then the COVID boom ended, and the games industry took the hit. As people returned to offices and started spending more time outside again, the time and money flowing into digital entertainment also began to shrink. Agarwal said the investment wave that had flooded the industry started drying up, and it became obvious that companies had overspent during the boom years. In that climate, Naughty Dog had to decide which project would actually get priority.

Naughty Dog chose Neil Druckmann’s next game instead

“One of the victims of that was the game I was directing,” Agarwal said about The Last of Us: Online. “At a certain point, a decision had to be made. Do this game, or do the next game that Neil Druckmann, the company president, was directing? So you can kind of understand what happened there. They had to choose the game that was the bread and butter of the studio instead of this more experimental game I was working on. I thought it was going to be huge, but unfortunately it never saw the light of day.”

What made the situation even harsher for Agarwal was the way he found out. According to him, he learned about the cancellation only 24 hours before Sony made it public. “That was a devastating moment for me,” he admitted. “Because I invested seven years in that game. To find out, as the game director, that it was going to be canceled 24 hours before it was announced publicly – that’s how I found out the game was going to be canceled. It was unfortunate. They had to do it that way because they needed to control the communication.” In other words, Sony appears to have feared leaks if the internal team had been informed earlier.

Even so, Agarwal did not give up after the collapse of The Last of Us: Online. He later moved to Tokyo, founded a new studio, and is already working on its first project. According to him, it will be a “triple-indie” multiplayer title built in Unreal Engine 5, combining the spirit of indie games with the narrative and cinematic ambition usually associated with AAA productions.

Source: 3DJuegos