If you're still hurt by the cancellation of The Last of Us Multiplayer, then the following quotes won't make that pain any easier to bear: many Naughty Dog developers apparently considered it the "best multiplayer" game they'd ever played.
The comment comes from the project's game director, Vinit Agarwal, who's been speaking about it publicly considerably more as of late. In a social media post, he vows to never let his work "not see the light again", seemingly hurt by the cancellation of The Last of Us' multiplayer side game.
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According to Agarwal, many former Naughty Dog developers "still message me today saying how amazing TLOU Online was going to be — still the best multiplayer game they’ve ever played".
Very few official details surrounding the project were ever shared by Sony, but it was assumed to be an expansion of the concept from the multiplayer mode in the first game. In it, you'd compete in tense online matches and find supplies to take back to your camp along the way.
The ex-game director has been talking up the cancelled game more recently, claiming it was 80% done at the point it was scrapped, having been in form some of development for seven years. However, after receiving funding for the project during Covid, the developer reached a crossroads: focus on The Last of Us Multiplayer or put the team on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
It's well documented at this point that Naughty Dog chose the latter.
In the years since its release, Sony has put out a number of multiplayer games like Concord, Helldivers 2, and Marathon to extremely varying degrees of success. For the hardcore PlayStation playerbase, The Last of Us' online effort was what seemed to resonate the most.