Canceled The Last of Us Part II multiplayer was 80% complete before Sony pulled the plug
New details explain how shifting industry economics sealed the project’s fate.
It has been just over two years since it was revealed that the multiplayer version of ‘The Last of Us Part II’ was canceled. This mode had been in pre-production with the game since work began on ‘The Last of Us Part II’, but eventually the team reached the “difficult decision to stop development,” and now its former director, Vinit Agarwal, has revealed more details about what happened with the title.
During an interview on Lance E. Lee’s LelPodcast, the director revealed that the game was “doing really, really well internally” and was about 80 percent complete before Sony and Naughty Dog decided to cancel it. Sony had previously invested in the project due to the growth of the gaming industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, by 2022–2023, when people had to return to the office, “all the money that had flowed into the industry wasn’t enough to sustain it. Because funds were being withdrawn, they had to cut back on spending as well. It basically collapsed.”
The Heartbreaking Choice
Eventually, the harsh reality set in for Naughty Dog.“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,’” commented Agarwal “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.”
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A little over a year ago, Shuhei Yoshida, former president of PlayStation Studios, spoke about what happened with this version of the game, noting that following discussions between Naughty Dog and Bungie, Neil Druckman’s studio concluded that developing this game would interfere with their next project, ‘Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet’.
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