The Last of Us is known for being a singleplayer, cinematic experience, but its Factions multiplayer mode is one of the most underrated PvP experiences I've personally ever played.
Naughty Dog had plans to expand that multiplayer component with a standalone PvP game set in the universe after The Last of Us: Part II, but it unfortunately never saw the light of day after being canceled in late 2023.
Vinit Argawal was the game director behind Naughty Dog's standalone The Last of Us Online game, which was officially canned a little over two years ago now. In a new interview on the Lance E. Lee Podcast from Tokyo, he opened up a bit about how "soul-crushing" the news of the game's cancellation was to him, and how it all went down.
According to Argawal, he was working on the project for about seven years. But like the Clickers and other infected before it, the push for TLOU multiplayer's development was also a product of a pandemic.
"Online games specifically saw a huge boost because people wanted to play with their friends, they couldn't see their friends, so they had to play online with their friends," Argawal explained about the COVID-19 gaming boom in 2020. "Online games got a huge boon. Sony decided to put a lot of money into online gaming, like everyone else was. That's part of why The Last of Us multiplayer got funding."
Argawal said the game was "doing really, really well internally" and it was "almost to 80 percent completion, it was very, very close to done." But he estimated that, when people started returning to the office in 2022 and 2023, it spelled doom for his game.
"That [pandemic gaming] spending reduced, the economy also went down," he explained. "And so, all that money that flooded into the game industry was not gonna be able to sustain because money's getting pulled out, they had to also collapse the spending. They overspent, basically. They were overzealous. One of the casualties of that was this game I was directing."
He continued to say that Naughty Dog was forced with a decision to choose between TLOU multiplayer and the studio's "bread and butter," which is a triple-A, cinematic, singleplayer experience. That other option ended up being the upcoming Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, directed by Neil Druckmann, and the choice was clear. Argawal's sentiment echoes what Naughty Dog said in its December 2023 announcement of TLOU multiplayer's cancellation.
"In ramping up to full production, the massive scope of our ambition became clear," Naughty Dog said. "To release and support The Last of Us Online, we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post-launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games. So, we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage."
The TLOU multiplayer was a game I was greatly looking forward to, especially after the first game's Factions multiplayer mode. I played it on both PS3 and PS4 as part of the remaster, and it's to this day one of the most fun and memorable multiplayer experiences I've had.
I'm sad that we'll never get to see what Argawal was cooking, but I hope that if there is a The Last of Us: Part 3, and that it will include something akin to Factions, because TLOU's gunplay and crafting mechanics made something special back then.
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