The cancelled The Last of Us multiplayer game is still clearly weighing on some of the people who worked on it. Former Naughty Dog director Vinit Agarwal says former colleagues continue to tell him how strong the project was before Sony’s studio pulled the plug.

Agarwal, who directed the standalone multiplayer project commonly referred to as The Last of Us Online, wrote over the weekend that it was "wild" how often former Naughty Dog teammates still reach out about the game.

"It's still the best multiplayer game they've ever played," Agarwal wrote, before adding: "Never going to let what I work on not see the light of day again."

He also thanked The Last of Us community for its "support and confidence," keeping the message brief but pointed after years of uncertainty around the project.

The comments land a few weeks after Agarwal said the game was roughly "80 percent" finished when it was cancelled. He also said he learned about the decision only 24 hours before Naughty Dog announced it publicly, calling the experience "soul crushing."

Naughty Dog’s multiplayer plans go back to the run-up to The Last of Us Part 2. The studio originally confirmed in 2019 that the sequel would not ship with multiplayer, explaining that its attempt to evolve the original game’s Factions mode had grown beyond something that could be included alongside the single-player campaign.

For a while, that sounded like a separate release rather than a dead end. Naughty Dog said in May 2023 that the game needed more time, but the studio was still publicly talking about the project as something in development. By December 2023, it had officially cancelled the standalone multiplayer game.

The decision became one of the clearest examples of Sony’s live-service rethink, especially because Naughty Dog framed the cancellation around a choice between becoming a studio built around years of live-service support or continuing to focus on single-player games. Agarwal’s latest comments do not revive the project, but they show that its cancellation still has a long tail inside and around Naughty Dog.