Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann says we ain't seen nothin' yet about the studio's new project, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
In reality, if Druckmann had said exactly those words, that wouldn't technically be true. We saw about four and a half minutes of Intergalactic thanks to its reveal trailer that debuted at last year's Game Awards, but that's it.
That trailer offered very little insight into how the game actually plays, showing only a cinematic with protagonist and bounty hunter Jordan heading to a mysterious alien planet and squaring up with some sort of robotic creature with red eyes and a big hammer-like weapon.
Talking to Variety, Druckmann offers the vaguest possible teases and repeats common refrains about Intergalactic, calling it Naughty Dog's most ambitious and expansive game yet.
"I can tell you we're in the thick of it. We're making it, we're playing it. We're firing on all cylinders," Druckmann says. "I've said this before, but I really mean it, I'm really feeling it right now: It's the most ambitious game we've ever made. It's the most expansive game we've ever made, maybe the most expensive, by the time we finish it."
More interesting to me, Druckmann also suggests the reveal trailer isn't fully representative of what's actually going on in Intergalactic.
"I'm so antsy to show it and talk about it because the trailer that we showed doesn't even scratch the surface of what this game actually is," he says. "But announcing a game like this, especially when it's new IP, especially when it's coming out of Naughty Dog, you've got to coordinate with marketing, with PR, with a bunch of people. So it'd be foolish for me to say when we're gonna show something right now."
We haven't seen any gameplay, but Druckmann himself has suggested he was inspired by Elden Ring's non-traditional, gameplay-based storytelling, although there's nothing to suggest Intergalactic's gameplay has any similarities to FromSoftware games. In this new interview, he again seems to imply Intergalactic is departing, or at least expanding upon, Naughty Dog's established style of linear, cinematic narratives.
"You could look at our previous titles and see the evolution of going from Uncharted, where we're really cutting our teeth on realistic character-action game, third-person shooter, combined with emotional storytelling," Druckmann says. "With The Last of Us, we added some RPG elements, we started playing with wide linear layouts. Continue that trajectory forward, add sci-fi and you start to get the sense of what we're doing, and then we've gotten even more ambitious than that."
Although Intergalactic has been in development for about five years, Naughty Dog is still keeping its cards incredibly close to its chest. Uncharted and The Last of Us are some of my favorite games ever, and I'm admittedly anxious about Naughty Dog apparently wanting to try something different with Intergalactic, but ultimately I'm steadied by my faith in a studio which, so far, has dropped nothing but cinematic masterpieces defined by emotionally resonant stories, polished and punchy action, and memorable characters.
Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us 2 dev's new Japan-based studio aims to make a multiplayer game with Naughty Dog-level cinematic action and a Breaking Bad-style story, and it's already playable
