Naughty Dog’s Intergalatic: The Heretic Prophet “Player Freedom” Rumored to Be Inspired by Elden Ring

Key Takeaways

The game is set 2000 years in the future in an alternate universe where the timeline deviates from ours in the 1980s, with a mysterious new religion forming.
Naughty Dog spent ‘years’ working on the timeline and how the religion changed throughout the years.
The game aims to make the player feel lost and alone in a mysterious universe, contrasting with Naughty Dog’s previous games that featured an ally/companion.

As a dedicated follower of Naughty Dog’s creations, I’m eagerly anticipating their upcoming game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Given their past successes with series like Uncharted and The Last of Us, it’s likely that this new title will share some similarities with those franchises.

If this new rumor that surfaced is accurate, players might be in a for a shock.

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet Will Offer More Player Freedom It’s Claimed

Although in recent years, Naughty Dog titles have expanded to offer far larger play areas, such as Uncharted 4 open-word-like zone, for the most part their experiences have tend to remain pretty linear.

Well, that might be changing with Intergalactic The Heretic Prophet, as a new rumor claims that the studio is taking inspiration from FromSoftware’s 2022’s Elden Ring. Specifically when it comes to “player freedom,” which we can only assume pertains to how Elden Ring allows nearly complete freedom of where you can go, while also managing to offer something for exploring

In an episode of MinnMax, founder Ben Hanson commented (via Okami), “I’ve heard Naughty Dog’s next game is very inspired by a game with a lot of player freedom […] Elden Ring is what it was compared to […] It’s taking place on one planet, uncovering the history of this world, you can kinda see a little bit where they might be going with that.”

Whether Intergalactic is open-world or not is something to remain to be seen.

As with all any rumor, take this is a grain of salt, as nothing is official until it’s official. Still, it does seem like a logical direction considering the space setting and all. The last time Naughty Dog did a space game was back in 2004 with Jak 4. The game featured multiple large open areas that could be explored. Could we be seeing Naughty Dog returning to a similar structure with Intergalactic? Perhaps, but hopefully we won’t have long to wait.

While not much is known about Intergalactic, more details about the action game has come to light thanks to a new creator chat Naughty Dog boss Neil Druckmann took part in. Here are some of the keypoints about it”

Set 2000 years in the future.
Alternate universe where the timeline deviates from ours in the 1980s.
A mysterious new religion forms around this time and starts to take hold.
Naughty Dog spent “years” working on the timeline and how the religion changed throughout the years.
Naughty Dog’s previous games have always had an ally/companion, so they wanted you to feel lost and alone in a mysterious universe this time.
“I really wanted to make a game about faith and religion – but also about being lonely.”
No one has been heard from on this planet for 600 years.
Neil Druckmann specifically calls out Half-Life 2 and the Monkey Island games as some of his favorite examples of storytelling. Mentions the fact that HL2 has less handholding and trusts the player to put together the pieces themselves.
Neil jokes: “With TLOU2, we made certain creative decisions that got us a lot of hate. A lot of people love it, a lot of people hated it […] The joke is, you know what let’s do something that people won’t care as much about. Let’s make a game about faith and religion.”

Announced last December at The Game Awards, Intergalactic: The Hertic Prophet has no release date set yet, but it is confirmed to be in development for the PS5.

2025-03-16 21:35

Key Takeaways

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet Will Offer More Player Freedom It’s Claimed

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