The PS5 generation is gradually drawing to a close and the manufacturers are preparing the arrival of the new consoles. Many players feel that this PS5 and Xbox Series generation will have been disappointing in a lot of ways. Between remasters and remakes by the dozen and studios now taking an eternity to produce anything, there has been plenty of disappointment and frustration. That is the case for Naughty Dog, which despite its status as one of PlayStation’s most important studios has still not released a single brand-new game on PS5. The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered did arrive in 2024, but that was obviously an improved version of a PS4 title. Meanwhile, the Californian studio has been working for several years on Intergalactic The Heretic Prophet, without yet announcing a release date.
Quite a surprising situation, especially when you remember Naughty Dog’s pace in previous generations. But the reasons for the delay have been revealed by Jason Schreier, never far away when there is a scoop to hand us. … the multiplayer The Last of Us, eventually cancelled.
Naughty Dog lost years on The Last of Us Online
It was in a video on his YouTube channel that Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier came back to the subject, discussing more broadly the difficulties Sony has run into with its live-service strategy. And above all he adds an important detail about how the teams are distributed at Naughty Dog. Contrary to what one might have thought, Intergalactic wasn’t being developed in parallel by most of the studio. A large part of Naughty Dog’s staff was working on the multiplayer The Last of Us game, while a far smaller team pushed ahead on the new licence. Jason Schreier then explains that Intergalactic only picked up a large share of Naughty Dog’s headcount after the multiplayer project was cancelled.
“A lot of people were working on that game at Naughty Dog. I think people believe it was just a side project while most of the studio worked on Intergalactic, but no. It’s the other way round.”
That considerably changes how we read the Californian studio’s work during the PS5 generation. For several years, Naughty Dog wasn’t simply taking its time on Intergalactic, since a large share of its resources was tied up in a project that would ultimately be abandoned.
As a reminder, The Last of Us Online was officially announced in 2022, having been presented as a project ambitious enough to become an experience in its own right. But the further development went, the more the prospect of a live-service game that could be fed for years became a problem. In December 2023, Naughty Dog finally announced the project’s cancellation. The studio explained at the time that carrying on would have required devoting practically all its resources to maintaining the game over the long term, which would have severely compromised its ability to produce its future single-player games. The problem was therefore far deeper than a simple cancellation: several years of work and a considerable share of the teams had already gone into the project. After that decision, the developers could be reassigned to Intergalactic, allowing the game to move up a gear in production.
That is also part of why the PS5 is reaching the end of its generation without a new Naughty Dog blockbuster. Where the PS4 hosted Uncharted 4 and then The Last of Us Part 2, the current generation will mainly have seen the studio maintain its older productions before unveiling its new licence. And Intergalactic could now be the real big Naughty Dog project of the end of the generation, or even a title that slides straight onto the next PlayStation. The game, announced in December 2024, remains very mysterious and no official release window has been given, even if the rumours point to a 2027 release...
During the press tour for the film Mortal Kombat 2 in May 2026, Tati Gabrielle, who plays Jordan A. Mun in Intergalactic, told Maxime Chao that she hadn’t yet finished her performance capture work on the game. That means that, even after the massive reassignment of the teams, development was still a long way from wrapped...
