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, including his time at Naughty Dog, and a bit about what happened with The Last of Us Online getting cancelled.
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“So, what happened was, during COVID, the game industry saw a huge growth because everyone was at home…Online games specifically saw a huge boost, because people wanted to play with their friends, because they couldn’t see their friends,” Agarwal begins to explain. He continues to say this led to Sony, like pretty much every major publisher, to push for more online multiplayer titles, which is part of why The Last of Us Online was given more support.
It’s worth noting though that work on the title actually began in 2016, according to Agarwal, it just wasn’t until the studio was properly through The Last of Us Part II that it could be given more attention, and ultimately more financial support, since the timing worked out that Sony wanted to have more multiplayer titles in its portfolio.
“The game was doing really really well internally. We developed it almost 80% completion. It was very very close to done,” he adds. It’s at this point though, in 2023, when the video game industry had begun to suffer the consequences of its COVID over-growth, that Agarwal says, “basically, a decision had to be made.” He also shares that, as part of Naughty Dog’s way to control the messaging on the game’s public cancellation, he only found out the game he was directing would be shuttered one day before the public announcement.
“Make this game [The Last of Us Online], or make the game that Neil Druckmann was directing, the president of the company. So, kind of naturally, you can understand what happened there. They had to pick the game that was kind of the sole bread-and-butter of the studio, rather than this experimental game I was working on that I believe was going to be really big, but unfortunately, couldn’t see the light of day. And that was a devastating moment for me.”
That devastation is what pushed Agarwal to form his own studio, which we initially heard about last year. Moving to Japan to start the studio combined both life and career goals, as he stated earlier in the podcast that he had studied in Japan and had always envisioned returning to live there full-time. Now, Agarwal and his co-founder Joe Pettinati, another former Naughty Dog developer, are making their own cinematic multiplayer title that Agarwal explains is inspired by 1990s-era Japanese anime.
It’s also inspired, like The Last of Us Online was, by some of Agarwal’s personal experiences, both of which were traumatic instances, one of which where he was robbed at gunpoint, and another where he was almost mugged and robbed by a group of young kids. He describes how he presumes those people robbed him/tried to rob him because they were desperate, and that feeling of desperation is what drives people to hunt other people for animals, even if all they get are scraps.
“The thing that was sad about it,” Agarwal says, “is these guys were holding me up at shotgun point, for what at the end of the day? They got my wallet that had like $30 in it. You know what ended up happening? They used my credit card once at McDonald’s, then they tried to use it at Walmart and they got rejected, and then they ditched it. And the phone, was shattered, because I dropped it on the floor. When a homeless guy called my brother on my phone, we got my phone back the next day, they had tossed it in a dumpster. So what did they really get out of that whole engagement? Maybe a McDonald’s meal? And yet, they did it because they were desperate, I presume.”
“…Moments where I really felt truly threatened for my life was the core thesis of what I was building, the game I was building. I wanted people to get that feeling…that sense of desperation that comes out of that, and what you’re willing to do when you’re desperate and the dehumanizing element of it where you’re gonna almost hunt someone like an animal for the scraps.“
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