When you look at the best PlayStation 5 games, or even a list of the best video games of all time, odds are you will see at least one game from developer Naughty Dog. Our list of upcoming video games was already stacked prior to The Game Awards 2024, but the last announcement of the night added one more to the list that might beat out other heavy hitters like Ghost of Yotei and Wolverine. As this is coming from Naughty Dog, this is already one of our most anticipated upcoming PS5 game, but others might need more convincing. We took out a bounty on all the information there is on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and this is what we came up with.
If you don’t have a PS5, there are plenty of upcoming Xbox Series X, upcoming PC, and upcoming Switch games, too.
Release window speculation
No release date or window was given for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, but we can give an educated guess as to when we think it might arrive. Head of creative Neil Druckmann stated that the team has “been working on this brand-new adventure since 2020!” That means the game is around four years into development. Given how long development cycles are for games at the level Naughty Dog makes, that probably means the game has another year or two left to go, likely making it a 2026 game.
However, Jason Schreier did make a comment on ResetEra in regards to Intergalactic’s release date after news about The Witcher 4 not arriving in 2026, stating, “I’m pretty sure I said they were both going to be very early teases. Neither of those games will be out next year.” This does line up with a quote Druckman gave in his episode of Creator to Creator where he said, “We still have a ways to go and I’m very excited to see [where it goes,]. Again, these things are so complex and big and there’s so many people involved. It’s like, I still don’t know exactly what this thing is going to look like at the end. I have a theory, I have an idea, but it’s still evolving and changing as we’re making it.”
Based on both of those statements, we would need to push our expectations to at least 2027, if not later. Assuming it did come in 2027, that would mean the game will have at least a seven-year development cycle, which would be the longest of any Naughty Dog game.
Platforms
Naughty Dog has been a PlayStation first-party studio for decades now, so it should come as no surprise that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is currently listed as a PS5 exclusive. That said, most PlayStation games have come to PC at this point, including all of Naughty Dogs modern games, so we expect this one to show up there as well after six months to a year.
Trailers
The announcement trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet came right at the end of The Game Awards 2024. It opens with the quote from an Ancient Sempirian Scripture: “The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end.” We see our new sci-fi setting of a bright red planet with a shattered moon in orbit and a bright red spaceship on approach.
Inside we meet Jordan A. Mun, a bounty hunter who has taken a job on the dangerous world of Sempiria. Her target is a man named Colin Graves, who is supposedly part of a group known as the Five Aces. This planet has had no communication with the outside universe for hundreds of years, and no one who has ventured there in the past 600 years has ever returned. She convinces her partner to accept the bounty despite the dangers and heads to the surface, hinting at a more personal stake in this bounty than just the reward. The trailer ends with an encounter with a massive robotic foe wielding some giant laser ax weapon.
In an interview with Creator to Creator, Neil Druckmann gave a few more details about this new universe. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet will take place 2,000 years in the future, but not from our current timeline. We don’t know what exactly causes the split, only that this timeline deviates from ours in the 1980s.
He also reinforces that the main themes of the game will be faith and religion, but also loneliness and isolation. “This whole religion takes place on this one planet, and then at one point, all communication stops,” Druckmann said. “And you’re playing a bounty hunter that’s chasing her bounty, and she crash lands on this planet.”
Gameplay
While the initial trailer didn’t show us real gameplay, we can discern a bit about what the game will be like from certain clues. The primary weapon showcased is Jordan’s red laser sword, which she leaps and strikes the enemy with at the end of the trailer. Based on that, plus Naughty Dog’s past work, it seems likely that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet will be a third-person action game with a focus on melee combat.
However, we do also see Jordan pick up a gun while on her ship, which we think means firearms will at least be an option. It’s also worth referencing an earlier blog post from Druckmann: “Our narrative goals are rivaled only by our gameplay ambitions: This will be the deepest gameplay in Naughty Dog’s history, taking our learnings from our previous franchises and pushing them beyond anything we’ve ever done before.” While unspecific, that is quite the ambitious claim.
In the same Creator to Creator interview, Druckmann did also reveal that the entire game will take place on this one planet. In addition, it will not feature a companion like the studio’s previous games have. “So many of the previous games we’ve done, there’s always, like, an ally with you,” Druckmann said. “I really want you to be lost in a place that you’re really confused about what happened here, who are the people here, what was their history. And in order to get off this planet — again, no one has been heard from this planet for 600 years or so — if you ever have hoped to have a chance to get off, you have to figure out what happened here.”
That doesn’t mean other characters won’t be present, but it seems the majority of the game will have Jordan exploring and fighting on her own.
Preorder
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is still at least a year away by our best estimation. As soon as any preorder details come up, we will update this article.
