Sony caught a lot of criticism for cancelling The Last of Us Online a couple of years ago. Recently, the former director on that game talked a bit more about it, sharing that the game was ‘80% complete' when it was scrapped. 

The Last of Us Online was almost complete and ready to go, according to Vinit Agarwal, who directed the game. In an interview on the LelPodcast (via Eurogamer), the director explained that Sony had put a lot of money into the game after the 2020 boom, but had cut back on spending around 2023, as did most other publishers across the industry.

Aside from the game being near completion, the director also shared that the game was finally going to get its public reveal just one day after the cancellation. If true, that means a trailer must have been prepared, which would have given fans a long overdue look at what this game was supposed to be.

The Last of Us Online began as an experimental multiplayer mode for The Last of Us Part 2 but eventually spun off into its own standalone game. The title was infamously cancelled after an internal review, in which Bungie reportedly provided negative feedback on the future viability of the game. However, in this interview, Agarwal suggests the issue was different – Naughty Dog only had so much budget left over and putting more resources into The Last of Us Online would have meant that The Heretic Prophet would be put on ice.

KitGuru Says: Were you looking forward to The Last of Us Online? At the very least, I do hope we get to see some footage of it at some stage, as the game remained shrouded in mystery right up to its cancellation. 

The Last of Us Online, otherwise known as Factions, was one of the casualties of Sony, and perhaps more accurately, Jim Ryan's push for PlayStation to churn out ten live service games to try and find something that would stick and become a new cash-cow for the company. Like most of those projects, The Last of Us Online was ultimately cancelled, but according to former game director Vinit Agarwal, the game was incredibly close to getting out the door before it was shuttered. Speaking on the Lance E. Lee Podcast from Tokyo, Agarwal digs into different periods of his career, […]

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