The last thing Naughty Dog released was in 2024, and it was the developer's The Last of Us Part II Remastered. To the former The Last of Us and Uncharted series' designer Benson Russell, that's a problem. Now a game development consultant, Russell recommends his former employer spare its next game from the prolonged development period it's accustomed to.
Naughty Dog's upcoming sci-fi adventure Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet has now been in production for six years. While the game doesn't yet have a release date, by the time it finally launches, we could be trudging toward the PS6 generation – which is why Russell tells FRVR in a new interview he thinks Naughty Dog's lethargic release calendar is "absolutely not" sustainable. He says about the developer, "They're one of the key stakeholders that get PlayStation[s] sold, right? So, when you think about it, they have not put an original IP out on this platform. The only thing they've done is The Last of Us [Remake]."
Russell guesses The Heretic Prophet's protracted production period is the result of "another Last of Us 2 situation," his term for Naughty Dog's eagerness to map a concise story to overstuffed gameplay. "It might need to be edited in that regard."
The former designer also expresses concern about The Heretic Prophet's interstellar setting, a huge change from Naughty Dog's more typical Earthly fare, in which the developer plays with ragged North American landscapes and jewel-tone islands for Nathan Drake to look disheveled on. The Heretic Prophet's seemingly grisly melee combat is also new for Naughty Dog, whose action segments are usually more strategic than aggressive – though, I think that look Crash Bandicoot always has in his eyes is also "aggressive."
Still, in Russell's experience, Naughty Dog can struggle in achieving new ideas. Even in those few years after the first Uncharted game came out in 2007, when Naughty Dog was releasing sequels and spin-offs on a nearly annual basis, Russell recalls the developer struggling to perfect its melee combat. He says, "We wanted brawling and all that kind of stuff, but it was a massive investment."
Now, as The Heretic Prophet heads toward its seventh year of development, Russell reflects on the industry-wide trouble of zombified production periods. The biggest titles reveal a small outbreak of developers dragging their feet – GTA 6 is a decade overdue, Fable has been delayed to 2027 after being announced in 2020, the Max Payne 1 and 2 remake has been under construction for four years and counting, and so on...
"I genuinely think these seven-year projects… you can get them back down to five," Russell says. "I think you could at least cut two years off of them, if not maybe a little more, just by defining yourself, getting that North Star solid right in the beginning. And it's not a difficult thing to do."
Otherwise, Russell argues, developers risk making a mess of their games with team changes, technical changes, and the unavoidable frustration of starting over.
And he has a point. But as studio closures and shrinking funds from publishers continue to threaten game development from the outside, it might not make a difference.
