To close out The Game Awards last December, Naughty Dog unveiled their next game and first new IP in over a decade with Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. A few weeks ago, studio head, and writer and director of the game, Neil Druckmann has unveiled the first bits of story about their new game. Sitting down on the Creator to Creator podcast with director Alex Garland, Druckmann discussed plenty of interesting details and how the studio has been developing the game over the course of the last four years.
The studio’s foray into the sci-fi genre with Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet will take players 2000 years into the future of an alternate timeline that veers off from reality in the 1980s. Druckmann goes on to explain that the team at Naughty Dog spent years developing the two millennia worth of history for the game and how religions evolve overtime from their inception to the modern era of the game.
He would then go on to expand a bit more on what we first learned in the reveal trailer back in December. The game will see bounty hunter Jordan A. Mun crash land on the religion’s planet which has not had any form of communication in 600 years. Druckmann commented how the majority of Naughty Dog’s previous games have always had a companion character alongside the main character. However, he wanted this game to be about “just being lonely.” He would continue on saying, “I really want you to be lost in a place that you’re really confused about what happened here, who are the people here, what was their history. And in order to get off this planet again, no one has been heard from this planet for 600 years or so, if you ever have hoped to have a chance to get off, you have to figure out what happened here.”
Druckmann would even briefly mention some of the fan backlash to some choices that were made in the studio’s previous game The Last of Us Part II, and how that evolved into a joke when it came to developing Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. He would jest, “So the joke is that, hey, let’s do something people won’t care as much about: faith and religion.”
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is still under development with no release date in sight. Though, with Druckmann also stating fans shouldn’t expect more from The Last of Us, it is safe to assume that Naughty Dog is full steam ahead on their new IP first and foremost. You can watch the full Creator to Creator episode featuring Druckmann below: