Naughty Dog studio head Neil Druckmann and 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland have sat down to have a chat as part of Sony’s new Creator to Creator series. The almost hour-long interview of each other touches on both their careers so far, storytelling, and the overall creative process. An excellent insight into two industry leads, but Neil Druckmann also talks of Naughty Dog’s next PS5 project, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
The game takes place 2,000 years in the future, with a timeline that deviates from our own in the late 1980s. Druckmann adds: “We made a game with The Last of Us 2 where we made certain creative decisions that got us a lot of hate. A lot of people love it, but a lot of people hate that game.” Garland interjects with “who gives a s**t?”, to which Druckmann responds: “Exactly. So the joke is like ‘you know what, let’s do something that people won’t care as much about. Let’s make a game about faith and religion.”
Naughty Dog spent a significant amount of time during development building out the religion on the planet Sempiria, which hasn’t given out any communication or signals for 600 years. Main character Jordan crashlands on the planet whilst hunting a bounty and must learn what’s happened there — alone.
Unlike previous Naughty Dog titles like The Last of Us and Uncharted to a degree, where you’d often have a companion by your side, the developer wanted to create a game about “being lonely”. Druckmann explains: “So many of the previous games we’ve done, there’s always like an ally with you and you’re talking. Our new one should be lost in a place that you’re really confused about what happened here, who are the people here, what was their history.”
As for when the game might come out, Druckmann says “there’s still a ways to go”, and even he doesn’t know “exactly what this thing is gonna look like at the end”. He has a “theory” but things are still evolving and changing during development.
