Intergalactic: Heretic Prophet inspired by Elden Ring ‘player freedom’

It seems The Last Of Us developer’s next game takes cues from Elden Ring and purposefully wants to make you feel lost and confused.

Naughty Dog finally revealed its next game during last year’s The Game Awards but it didn’t really explain what the game is and there are still a lot of unanswered questions about it.

As shown in the reveal trailer, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet swaps the gritty realism of The Last Of Us for an 80s inspired sci-fi adventure. You play as Jordan A. Mun, a bounty hunter who finds herself stranded on a distant planet called Sempira, whose ‘communication with the outside universe went dark hundreds of years ago’.

While we know the premise, the gameplay of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is largely a mystery – although it seems to be some kind of third person actioner. An insider, however, has now claimed the game is inspired by FromSoftware’s juggernaut epic, Elden Ring.

This rumour stems from MinnMax podcast host Ben Hanson, who teased in October last year that ‘somebody very in the know who worked on the game’ had compared Naughty Dog’s next title – before it was officially announced – to a game ‘with a lot of player freedom’.

While he didn’t reveal the point of comparison at the time, Hanson teased the cited inspiration in the latest episode of The MinnMax Show.

‘I think it’s fine to say it now, that game was Elden Ring, is what it was compared to,’ Hanson said. ‘If I’d have said, ‘Naughty Dog’s next game is like Elden Ring’, then that reveal trailer comes out, I feel like we would have been lit on fire.’

While he doesn’t go into any further detail about what this comparison means, this comes after Neil Druckmann, the director behind Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, teased that he wanted players to feel ‘lost’ without any AI companion.

In an interview with film director Alex Garland, Druckmann said: ‘So many of the previous games we’ve done, there’s always, like, an ally with you. 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.’

When combined together, this suggests Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is an open world game – something the studio has experimented with in the past through designated open areas in The Last Of Us Part 2 (the Seattle section) and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (the jeep sequence in Madagascar).

There’s a chance this Elden Ring inspiration, however, could be related to the storytelling. Back in 2023, Druckmann said he was ‘intrigued’ by Elden Ring and how it doesn’t rely on a ‘traditional narrative’ to tell its story.

‘I’m more recently intrigued by stuff like Elden Ring and Inside that doesn’t rely as much on traditional narrative to tell its story,’ Druckmann told The Washington Post. ‘Some of the best storytelling in The Last Of Us is cinematics, but a lot of it is in gameplay, and moving around the space, and understanding the history of a space by just looking at it and examining it.

‘To me, right now, that’s some of the best joy I get out of games that trust their audience to figure things out. [Games] that don’t hold your hand, that’s the stuff I’m really intrigued by going forward.’

He added: “That doesn’t mean we will never have dialogue, or cut scenes, I think those are tools in your toolbox… And I think there’s a way to push that stuff forward, at least for the kind of games we make at Naughty Dog.

‘I’m really intrigued, again, never resting on our laurels and trying something a little bit new, a little bit different, that not everybody’s going to like, but that’s OK. And the stuff that we’re working on now, I can tell you the teams are very excited by the different projects we have at Naughty Dog.’

While it remains to be seen how this will translate into the final game, more freedom in the narrative or gameplay is certainly an exciting thought considering the polished execution of Naughty Dog’s past projects.

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet doesn’t have a release date (or even a year) yet, but it’s set to be released at some point on PlayStation 5.

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