Neil Druckmann says Naughty Dog's next game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, is still changing and evolving as it's being developed.
Naughty Dog announced The Heretic Prophet at The Game Awards in December 2024, but it's been in development since 2020. That said, if you were hoping to get your hands on it any time soon, you might not want to hold your breath.
"We still have a ways to go and I'm very excited to see [where it goes,] Druckmann said in a new episode of Sony's Creator to Creator video series (timestamped here). "Again, these things are so complex and big and there's so many people involved. It's like, I still don't know exactly what this thing is going to look like at the end. I have a theory, I have an idea, but it's still evolving and changing as we're making it."
Druckmann's words are a little too ambiguous to make any clear-cut call on where The Heretic Prophet is in development, but I would imagine that if it were in the later stages he wouldn't be using conceptual terms like "theory" and "idea." For what it's worth, The Last of Us 2 spent six years in development from 2014 to 2020, although it's worth noting that the Covid-19 pandemic caused a months-long last-minute delay.
Despite a generous four-minute reveal trailer, we still don't know a whole lot about The Heretic Prophet, aside from the fact that it's a sci-fi action game set roughly 2000 years in the future. We do also know it stars a brand new protagonist, a bounty hunter named Jordan A. Mun who finds herself stranded on a dangerous planet that kills anyone who enters its orbit and thus is cut off from the rest of the universe.
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is "a game about faith and religion," which Neil Druckmann jokes will surely get less hate than The Last of Us 2.
