It’s been a long time since the release of The Last of Us 2 (and no, we don’t consider the modernization of the first and second installments a new development…), and it seems we still have a long wait for the next game.

Jason Schreier, editor of Bloomberg, says that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, the new sci-fi IP from Naughty Dog, will not only not be released this year, but next year as well! This comes after CD Projekt RED announced that The Witcher IV will not be released until 2027 at the earliest (as we reported). Both games were first seen at The Game Awards in December, and in the wake of that, Schreier wrote on the ResetEra forum that both titles showed up in early previews at the last major video game event of 2024, and said that we shouldn’t expect either of them to be released in 2026!

Recently, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet director Neil Druckmann also said that Naughty Dog still has a lot of work to do on the game, as these games are complex and big, and a lot of people are attached to them. He doesn’t know what it will look like at the end of development because he only has a theory about it. He has an idea, but it will evolve and change as the game develops. And this comment really suggests that Naughty Dog is still far away from the final (bug-fixing, performance-optimizing) phase of development…

If Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is indeed coming in 2027, it will be seven years since the release of The Last of Us 2. While the studio has also been working on The Last of Us Online, which led to TLoU2 dropping the Factions mode and becoming a larger project in its own right, Bungie’s feedback on the project was not positive, and the studio realized that maintaining a live service game and developing single-player adventures at the same time was not a viable option for them.

This is all unofficial!

Source: WCCFTech