Naughty Dog’s Canceled Last of Us Online Was 80% Done. The Director Found Out It Was Dead 24 Hours Before the Public Did
Vinit Agarwal spent seven years directing The Last of Us Online. On April 25 he posted that ex-colleagues still message him saying it was the best multiplayer game they ever played. “Never going to let what I work on not see the light of day again,” he wrote.
That vow lands differently when you know how he found out the project was dead.
“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.”
The game was 80 percent complete when Naughty Dog pulled the plug in December 2023. Sony had brought in Bungie, the Destiny developer they bought for $3.6 billion, to assess their live-service pipeline. Bungie questioned whether the project could hold a player base long-term. The team was scaled back, the project went on ice, and then Naughty Dog announced the cancellation with a blog post. Agarwal read about it alongside everyone else.
The official reason was clean. Naughty Dog said they had two paths: become a live-service studio or stay focused on the single-player narrative games that built their reputation. They chose the latter. What they did not say publicly was that the choice was specifically between The Last of Us Online and the next Neil Druckmann project, now known as Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The president of the company was directing that one. The math was not complicated.
Here is what the audience should know: the franchise this multiplayer game would have extended has spent the last five years alienating the people who made it successful in the first place. The Last of Us Part II in 2020 killed Joel in its first act, forced players to spend half the game as his murderer, and triggered one of the largest review-bomb campaigns in gaming history. The game’s Metacritic user score hit 3.4 out of 10. The Last of Us TV show Season 2 followed the same story beats and landed at 3.6 on Metacritic from users, with 62 percent of reviews classified as negative and an audience score of 39 percent on Rotten Tomatoes versus a critics score of 95. Neil Druckmann’s response to the backlash was to tell a podcast “who gives a s---?” and announce his next game would be about faith and religion because “let’s do something that people won’t care as much about.”
The studio that built its reputation on Joel and Ellie is now making Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, a space game with a female lead and no announced connection to The Last of Us. Agarwal left Naughty Dog and founded his own studio in Japan in July 2025.
He is probably right that the game was something special internally. Former colleagues do not keep messaging years later about projects that were merely okay. Whether audiences primed by five years of franchise fatigue and narrative whiplash would have shown up for it is a different question — and one that will now never get answered.
Fans who loved the first game and the first season of the show may have dodged a worse outcome. A live-service game built on a franchise that Druckmann was actively steering into deeper ideological territory would have been a commitment, not a product. Servers stay live for years. Community management means defending creative decisions in real time. The game that Agarwal’s ex-colleagues remember fondly was pre-Part II. What Naughty Dog would have shipped in 2024 or 2025 is another matter.
Agarwal says he will never let a project he leads die in the dark again. His Japan studio’s first announcement will be worth watching.
What would have gotten you to play The Last of Us Online?
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