Neil Druckmann might be looking ahead to next month’s premiere of The Last of Us Season 2 on HBO right now, but in terms of games, he’s got Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet in the timeline, which promises to be the start of a new franchise for Naughty Dog.
Speaking with fellow zombie enthusiast Alex Garland of 28 Years Later, Druckmann spoke a bit about the themes he hopes to include in his latest game. “With The Last of Us 2, 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,” he began.
“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,” he continued. The world of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is set 2000 years in the future, and the planet we’ll be playing on has been abandoned for around 600 years. Its religion and culture remains a mystery, but to escape we’ll have to figure it all out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJUab499PVA/
“This new religion becomes pretty prominent and then we spend years just building out this religion like from the original prophet all the way [to] how it gets like changed and sometimes bastardised and evolves over all these years,” Druckmann explained.
Something else he hopes to tackle in this game is a feeling of isolation and loneliness. You won’t have any friends to help you in Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, and so it’s up to you to figure out your way off the planet.