Cancelled The Last of Us Online director says it was 'the best multiplayer game' the team had ever played

The cancellation of The Last of Us Online is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. At least in the imaginations of many TLOU fans—it was cancelled after all, so we never actually got to see whether it lived up to the hype.

Nevertheless, former game director Vinit Agarwal has called his cancelled baby "the best multiplayer game [the team] ever played" when reminiscing on the project over the weekend. "It’s wild how many of my ex-colleagues still message me today saying how amazing TLOU Online was going to be," Agarwal expressed.

After the success of the mode in the first game, Naughty Dog planned to expand the idea with The Last of Us Part 2. However, the studio explained in 2019 that it "grew beyond an additional mode that could be included with [an] enormous single player campaign". As a result, it would instead become a fully-fledged The Last of Us multiplayer spin-off.

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Agarwal's recent comments come only three weeks after he claimed that The Last of Us' multiplayer spinoff was "developed…to 80 percent completion". Agarwal explained that it was canned because a decision had to be made: "Make this game, or make this next game that Neil Druckmann was directing, the president of the company."

Unfortunately, Agarwal revealed that he only found out his project was cancelled 24 hours before the "soul-crushing" public announcement. In light of that, Agarwal closed his recent post with a vow: "Never going to let what I work on not see the light of day again. Thank you all for your support and confidence!"

That next game directed by Neil Druckmann, I can only assume, is Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which, at the end of 2025, saw Naughty Dog reportedly enforce mandatory overtime to finish an internal demo.

While the next iteration of TLOU's Factions mode remains banished to the shadow realm, I really hope it reappears in some form in the future. It was good fun! Hell, I miss the days when single player games regularly had tacked-on multiplayer for the sake of it. They weren't always hits, but they were always interesting in one way or another.