“The Last of Us” Multiplayer Was 80% Done

Just over two years ago, word came that developer Naughty Dog, which had spent years developing a live service multiplayer title in its “The Last of Us” franchise, had cancelled the project.

Dubbed ‘Factions’ by fans and “The Last of Us Online” within the company, the title was one of the most notable casualties of Sony’s hard pivot away from a number of planned live service titles under former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who announced his exit in September 2023.

At the time, in a press release, the reasoning was simple – resource hogging. Essentially, the staff, attention and resources required to keep generating fresh content for the live service title would’ve come at the sacrifice of developing new single-player games and properties – the very thing Naughty Dog built its reputation (and this franchise) on.

They chose not to proceed, turning their attention instead to the upcoming “Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet” and at least one other single-player game in the works.

Now, Vinit Agarwal, the director of the multiplayer title who has since left Naughty Dog and moved to Japan, gave a lengthy interview with Lance E. Lee this week to talk about his career and offered new insight as to how far along the project actually was.

He revealed he worked on “The Last of Us” multiplayer for nearly seven years – from 2016-2023 – and that the game had reached “almost 80% completion”. A lot of it is tied to the issue that Sony started betting big on live service games around 2020 as COVID began.

Then, as restrictions loosened and various high-profile live service flops took place, investment into the genre was pulled right back. Combined with the internal resource limitations, the cancellation was inevitable:

“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.”

There have been teases of a third game in the series, with many wondering if parts of the scrapped ‘Factions’ could be cannibalised for that project. The original 2013 “The Last of Us” PS3 game had an online multiplayer mode titled ‘Factions’, which was very well received, but the servers were shut down in late 2019.