The cancellation of The Last of Us Online is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. At least in the imaginations of many TLOU fans—it was cancelled after all, so we never actually got to see whether it lived up to the hype.
Nevertheless, former game director Vinit Agarwal has called his cancelled baby “the best multiplayer game [the team] ever played” when reminiscing on the project over the weekend. “It’s wild how many of my ex-colleagues still message me today saying how amazing TLOU Online was going to be,” Agarwal expressed.
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Agarwal’s recent comments come only three weeks after he claimed that The Last of Us’ multiplayer spinoff was “developed…to 80 percent completion”. Agarwal explained that it was canned because a decision had to be made: “Make this game, or make this next game that Neil Druckmann was directing, the president of the company.”
That next game directed by Neil Druckmann, I can only assume, is Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which, at the end of 2025, saw Naughty Dog reportedly enforce mandatory overtime to finish an internal demo.
While the next iteration of TLOU’s Factions mode remains banished to the shadow realm, I really hope it reappears in some form in the future. It was good fun! Hell, I miss the days when single player games regularly had tacked-on multiplayer for the sake of it. They weren’t always hits, but they were always interesting in one way or another.
