Director of scrapped The Last of Us Online says his new US/Japan studio is making a cinematic multiplayer title
Naughty Dog cancelled the online Last of Us game in December 2023
The director of the scrapped online spin-off of The Last of Us says he launched a new studio in Japan to make something similar.
Vinit Argawalm, who was at Naughty Dog for around a decade, was the game director on what was known internally as The Last of Us Online, but after the project was scaled back in size the developer eventually announced in December that it had been cancelled.
Now, in a new interview with Game*Spark, Argawalm has said that he and former Naughty Dog creative director Joe Pettinati have formed a new studio because they want to create something similar.
Specifically, Argawalm explained that wanted to make a multiplayer game that offers the level of action found in a typical single-player Naughty Dog game.
“My main titles were Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and The Last of Us Part 2,” Argawalm said (via machine translation). “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.”
Argawalm has opened an office in Japan, while Pettinati has remained in the US, with their game being developed across both ‘bases’. The team currently has around 10 staff in total, with plans being to increase this to around 30.
Further reading
Their new game, which Argawalm describes as a “triple-indie” title, has now been in development for a few months, and while it isn’t yet ready to show to the public, he says he’s “playing it with friends every week”.
“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,” he said. “We’re already in contact with partners, and we expect to have more information to share in the future.”
Naughty Dog officially cancelled The Last of Us Online in December 2023, saying the game became so ambitious that it would have required a complete shift in the studio’s focus for the foreseeable future.
“In ramping up to full production, the massive scope of our ambition became clear,” a statement from the studio said at the time. “To release and support The Last of Us Online we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games.
“So, we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.”
