The Last of Us Online was a project that many fans of the series were excited about, since there are still people who, to this day, play the Factions multiplayer mode that launched with the original game in 2013. But Naughty Dog decided it didn't want to be a multiplayer-focused studio, and ended up cancelling the project after years of development work, to the disappointment of fans, and the developers at Naughty Dog who worked on the project and saw its potential.
Including the former game director on the project at Naughty Dog, Vinit Agarwal, who, in a recent interview with Game*Spark (spotted by VGC), spoke about how one of the reasons he left after a decade with the studio was that he saw "the potential in combining Naughty Dog’s specialty, cinematic action, with multiplayer," after his time working on The Last of Us Online and every other project he was on at Naughty Dog.
"My main titles were Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and The Last of Us Part 2. I worked on both multiplayer and single-player. I was mainly in charge of boss battles, and Naughty Dog’s boss battles are generally one-on-one situations. So I wanted players to feel like they were fighting a human player, not an AI, even in single-player. To be more specific, I worked on the final boss in A Thief’s End and the fight between Ellie and Abby in The Last of Us Part II. I used all my knowledge of multiplayer to create the feeling that you were fighting a human. A big part of what inspired me to [go independent] was seeing the potential in combining Naughty Dog’s specialty, cinematic action, with multiplayer."
Agarwal has set up a new international studio between the United States and Japan with another Naughty Dog alumnus, writer and former creative director Joe Pettinati, who will be running the US office, while Agarwal will be based in Japan. The official name of the studio has yet to be announced.
This new title, which Agarwal described as "triple-indie," is still early in its development, only being a few months along at the time of this writing.
"There’s not much we can say yet, but the new game is a multiplayer game, and we aim to bring the cinematic action we’ve been familiar with from our previous titles to multiplayer," said Agarwal. "We’re already in contact with partners, and we expect to have more information to share in the future."
Whatever Agarwal and Pettinati are working on, it won't look like The Last of Us Online, and it certainly won't feature anything copyrighted by Sony, but it could potentially be the multiplayer game that Factions fans were hoping to play before the official project was shut down.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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