Naughty Dog’s next game will reportedly offer ‘a lot of player freedom’

Naughty Dog’s next game will reportedly have a significant focus on player freedom.

That’s according to MinnMax founder Ben Hanson, who said he’d received some information about the secretive project from “somebody very in the know, who worked on the game”.

“The tone was like, you are all not ready for how amazing this thing is going to be, and the tone was—I’m not going to say the game that they referenced to compare it to because I don’t want people to be like, MinnMax said it was going to be exactly like this—but they compared it to a game with a lot of player freedom.”

Hanson added that the game Naughty Dog’s upcoming title was compared to wasn’t Hitman.

Naughty Dog head Neil Druckmann said last year that he’d like the studio to focus less on traditional narrative in future projects.

“I’m more recently intrigued by stuff like Elden Ring and Inside, that don’t rely as much on traditional narrative to tell a story,” he told The Washington Post.

“I think some of the best storytelling in The Last of Us – yes, a lot of it is in the cinematics – but a lot of it is in the gameplay, and moving around a space, and understanding a history of a space by just looking at it and examining it.

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

On what this may mean for future Naughty Dog projects, Druckmann added: “It doesn’t mean we will never have dialogue or cutscenes.

“I think those are tools in your toolbox and it’s about how to use all these different aspects – some of it from other media, some of it [as] found notes and environmental storytelling.

“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, [we’re] never resting on our laurels, and trying something a little bit new, a little bit different, that not everyone’s going to like, but that’s okay.

“And again, it’s stuff that we’re working on now – I can tell you that the teams are very excited by the different projects we have at Naughty Dog.”

Druckmann said in July that numerous games, including “multiple single-player projects”, were in development at Naughty Dog, but stressed that while they won’t all be The Last of Us titles, they will have a similar goal.

“We create experiences that are steeped in story and character, especially relationships,” he told the LA Times. “The stories have some sort of philosophical core that everything is going to revolve around and feed into.”