New particulars about what occurred to The Last of Us multiplayer sport that by no means was have emerged, because of a former Naughty Canine developer who labored on it.
Talking to podcaster Lance E. Lee (through Kotaku), developer Vinit Agarwal stated that the canceled Last of Us live-service title was nearly at “80% completion,” including that the sport was “very, very near carried out.” Agarwal, who had labored on Uncharted 4: A Thief’s Finish, Uncharted: The Misplaced Legacy, and The Last of Us Half 2, was the sport director for this multiplayer sport.
In response to Agarwal, Sony had invested within the undertaking after an uptick in on-line gaming within the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. He added that The Last of Us on-line title “made a whole lot of progress, and the sport was doing actually, very well internally.” Studio head and The Last of Us creator Neil Druckmann even known as the sport Naughty Canine’s “most formidable undertaking” again in January 2023.
However Agarwal stated that assets for the sport had been pulled again as COVID-related restrictions loosened and other people resumed in-office work. Ultimately, Naughty Canine had to decide on between the net title or “the subsequent sport that Neil Druckmann was directing.” The net sport was canceled in December 2023, with the studio saying that post-release help would “severely [impact] growth on future single-player video games.”
“That was a devastating second for me as a result of I spent seven years engaged on that sport and it was soul-crushing,” Agarwal stated, who added that he solely discovered about his sport’s cancellation 24 hours earlier than Naughty Canine’s announcement. Agarwal left Naughty Canine in January 2025 and moved to Japan to kind his personal studio.
Naughty Canine has the Druckmann-led Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet lined up for a PlayStation 5 launch, although some imagine Druckmann might have teased a brand new Last of Us sport in a current Instagram publish.