The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann has revealed he’s involved in a second unannounced project at Naughty Dog, alongside his sci-fi game Intergalactic.
Naughty Dog has historically struggled to work on multiple large games simultaneously, and following the cancellation of its The Last of Us online game 17 months ago, it was unclear whether it would be destined to continue focusing on a single main project, even though it insisted at the time it was planning multiple games.
Now, speaking to the Press X to Continue podcast, Druckmann has reiterated that Naughty Dog is still working on at least two projects, and confirmed that he is producing an unannounced game alongside Intergalactic.
“We have several directors on Intergalactic,” he said. “I work with two game directors: Matthew Gallant and Kurt Margenau, [and] I have a co-writer in Clair Carré.
“So there are times when I’m away and they are in charge, and I get to come back and be surprised and enjoy certain choices they made, and other ones I pull my hair out over and we have to change course or argue about it”.
He continued: “Then there’s another game that’s being worked on at Naughty Dog where I’m in more of a producer role and I get to mentor, watch this other team, and give feedback and be the executive in the room. “I enjoy all those roles, and the fact that I jump from one to the next makes my job very exciting and always feeling fresh. I’m never bored.”
Druckmann’s comments suggest that at least two prominent game directors, Shaun Escayg (Uncharted: The Lost Legacy), and Anthony Newman (The Last of Us: Part II) could be working on unannounced projects.
Former Naughty Dog president Evan Wells admitted in a 2021 interview that the studio was still struggling to fully implement a multi-project development strategy, following the release of The Last of Us: Part II.
The PlayStation studio first attempted to embrace a multi-project model following the completion of 2009’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, with designers Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann establishing a second team to create The Last of Us, alongside the group working on a third Uncharted.
However, Wells told Game Maker’s Notebook that Naughty Dog was ultimately unable to maintain two full productions, with one project inevitably gaining favour and pulling resources from the other, and that it was an issue the studio still struggled with in 2021.
“The amount of effort that was required to finish Uncharted 3 at the time was stealing resources away from The Last of Us, and we never got to the point where we had two full productions going,” he said.
“I would say even today, we’re just short of that. We definitely have multiple projects, but only one that is getting the lion’s share of focus at any time.
“We don’t have two projects that have several hundred people on them. We have one [project] and then some that are in pre-production, or maybe just creeping out of pre-production, but will have to wait until the main focus has completed before we move everybody off of that project.”
