Naughty Dog’s Upcoming Sci-Fi Game Reportedly To Feature Player Freedom Similar To Elden Ring

In a MinnMax podcast from last October, two months before Naughty Dog’s upcoming space-themed sci-fi adventure Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet was revealed at The Game Awards 2024, Ben Hanson, industry insider and a host of the program, hinted that the game would be comparable “to a game with a lot of player freedom.” Now that it’s finally time to let this mystery be solved. 

In another episode of the podcast (shared via this Reddit post), he said, “I think it’s fine to say it now. Elden Ring is what it was compared to back then. But if I would have said, ‘Naughty Dog’s next game is like Elden Ring,’ and then that reveal trailer comes out, we would have been lit on fire.”

This might sound unexpected for some, but back in January of 2023, Neil Druckmann, CEO of Naughty Dog and director of both Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and The Last of Us, expressed that he had recently been “intrigued” by unconventional storytelling methods in games such as Elden Ring and INSIDE.

It’s known that the narrative of Intergalactic follows the story of a new protagonist, Jordan A. Mun, a dangerous bounty hunter who finds herself in isolation on a remote planet called Sempira without communication with the outside. She has to leave its orbit, a challenge that no one was able to complete in over 600 years. Now, it sounds like the game is going to be set in an open world that allows players to explore Sempira freely.  

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet has been in development since 2020, with no release window announced yet. The studio describes the game as its “wildest, most creative story yet” with “deepest gameplay in Naughty Dog’s history.” It also “lives up to the Naughty Dog tradition of creating an emotional, character-driven epic journey.”