Neil Druckmann has gone on the record on Naughty Dog’s future.
As reported by MP1st, Neil revealed that Naughty Dog is making a lot of single player games. That includes, but is not exclusive to, the next The Last of Us game. To quote Neil:
“I promise you, we will not be ‘The Last of Us’ studio forever.”
Neil had previously shared sentiments in a prior interview that he wanted to get away from making big games. He had also expressed his enthusiasm about making a particular game, that seems to have been taken out of context. It got to the point that he had to share his exact statement word for word.
It is certainly understandable why Neil would reassure fans that Naughty Dog wasn’t just going to be the The Last of Us studio. While Sony has seen great crossover success with the The Last of Us HBO show, gamers themselves are feeling fatigue for the franchise after the PlayStation 5 remake of The Last of Us Part 2.
That remake released four years after the original, and was only one generation apart from the original. To punctuate the issue, the PlayStation 5 could already play the PlayStation 4 version of The Last of Us Part 2, thanks to backwards compatibility.
The perhaps ironic thing about all this is that when Naughty Dog introduced the The Last of Us franchise, fans saw it as a great departure from their prior signature IP, the Uncharted franchise. Both games have been very key in not only making the PlayStation a successful platform, but in defining the PlayStation’s key values as a publisher.
If Uncharted was seen as Naughty Dog’s and Sony’s expression of pushing video games to the next level, by making them more ‘cinematic’, as they branded it, The Last of Us was promoted to us as video games becoming a more ‘serious’ medium. We put quotes on these claims, not because they’re inaccurate, but because Naughty Dog and Sony did not invent these ideas for video games. They did, however, use this messaging to push their idea of what AAA games should be. The success of those games certainly moved other developers to take their games on similar directions.
Naughty Dog making more games could mean making smaller games. Now, we do believe it’s unlikely they will jump back in to Crash Bandicoot or The Way of The Warrior (could you imagine?). While some fans may want to see them return to older IPs, like Jak and Daxter, it’s more likely that they will have new game ideas, for shorter games that still push their AAA production values.
But Sony and Naughty Dog could certainly surprise us by showing us some of these smaller game ideas now, since they’re likely to release sooner.
