The director of the canceled Last of Us Online title recently opened up about how he was informed about the cancellation a day before the reveal.
For those unaware, the Last of Us Online project, also known as Factions, was canceled in 2023 as Naughty Dog shifted its focus to single-player titles. Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida thought it was great when he played it, too. Now, the director of the canceled title has provided some insights into what transpired.
Last of Us Online Was Canceled After Seven Years of Development
During a new interview on the Lance E. Lee Podcast from Tokyo (via Kotaku), Last of Us Online director Vinit Agarwal shed some light on how the game was canceled. Agarwal first spoke about the boom in the gaming industry during COVID, noting that online games experienced a significant boost around 2020. Which is when Sony, like all others, “decided to put a lot of money into online gaming”.
That is how Last of Us Online was able to secure its funding, and Agarwal stated that the “game was doing really, really well internally” with the team developing it to almost “80% completion”, it was “very close to done”. However, over the next couple of years, as people started returning to their offices, spending on online gaming dropped significantly, which led studios to reduce their projects as well.
Agarwal added that eventually the studio had to make a decision, whether to go ahead with Last of Us Online, or “make the next game that Neil Druckmann was directing.” Which basically led them to pick the game, which was “kind of the bread and butter of the studio rather than this experimental game that I was working on,” he added.
The Last of Us Online director described it as a “devastating moment” and “soul-crushing” for him, as he had spent 7 years working on the title. Moreover, he revealed that even after serving as a director on the game, he learned that The Last of Us was being canceled “24 hours before it was announced to the public.”
In other news, in a recent social media post, Neil Druckmann, the creator of The Last of Us, alluded to a little more in the pipeline. Additionally, Terminal War is a new shooter that is inspired by the canceled Last of Us Online project. What are your thoughts on Last of Us Online’s director finding out the game was canceled a day ahead of the reveal? Leave your thoughts down in the comments, and join the official Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Crazy how many of these games out there just dead in the water never played by anyone but the devs and will never see the light of day anywhere else they will just be shelved or deleted because “maybe one day we’ll come back to it and do something with it”.