Naughty Dog's next game is reportedly all about "player freedom," and it might just make good on the original idea for The Last of Us 2

best zombie games — (Image credit: Sony)

Naughty Dog is primarily noted for its work on narrative-focused linear action games in recent years thanks to the success of Uncharted and The Last of Us. Now it seems the studio's next game might be leaning into more open-ended design.

"I heard from somebody very in the know, who worked on [Naughty Dog's next game], that they're like 'Jesus Christ,'" Ben Hanson, formerly of Game Informer, says on the most recent episode of his MinnMax podcast (thanks, VGC). "The tone was like, 'You are all not ready for how amazing this thing is going to be.' I'm not going to say the game that they referenced to compare it to because I don't want people to be like, 'MinnMax said it was going to be exactly like this!' But they compared it to a game with a lot of player freedom. Like, 'Did you like that game?' And I said 'yes.' And it's like, 'Well, there you go! It's going to be good!'"

That's, uh, vague, to say the least, but given how desperate fans have been for new info on whatever Naughty Dog is doing next, any tiny morsel of insight is going to be devoured. Hanson notes that the game referenced was not Hitman, but beyond that, the meaning of "player freedom" here is completely open to your interpretation.

We've already seen Naughty Dog take a few tentative steps in this direction. Uncharted 4 saw some experiments with semi-open-world areas in an otherwise linear game structure, and that idea was greatly expanded in the early Seattle chapter of The Last of Us 2. It seems Naughty Dog was originally quite keen on that idea, too, as the studio has confirmed The Last of Us 2 was originally a Bloodborne-inspired open-world game.

As for Naughty Dog's next game, studio head Neil Druckmann noted back in 2023 that he was interested in "trying something a little bit new, a little bit different, that not everybody's going to like." In the same interview, he said, "I'm more recently intrigued by stuff like Elden Ring and Inside that doesn't rely as much on traditional narrative to tell its story." He quickly noted that the studio's unlikely to ditch dialogue and cutscenes altogether, but it seems likely this next game will still take on a much different form than we've gotten used to from Naughty Dog.

Last year, Naughty Dog canceled its The Last of Us multiplayer game after nearly four years of work.