The Last of Us and Uncharted fans have been put on alert following a new tease about a new Naughty Dog from an industry insider. Whether this game is The Last of Us Part 3 or Uncharted 4, is unfortunately not clear. As for the tease, it comes from Ben Hanson, formerly of Game Informer, and now of MinnMax.
According to Hanson, who is not known to tease for attention unlike some industry insiders, the game Naughty Dog is cooking up is “amazing,” which isn’t very surprising considering the pedigree of the studio and its catalog of releases.
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“I heard from somebody very in the know who worked on the game that they’re like J***** C*****… the tone was like you are all not ready for how amazing this is going to be… and the tone was. I’m not going to say the game that they referenced to..… but they compared it to a game with a lot of player freedom…”
The interesting thing here is not that the game is reportedly amazing, but the part about “player freedom.” The Uncharted and The Last of Us series are not completely linear, but they are pretty linear and fairly scripted. Something like player freedom is not associated with either. This begs the question: is this something new? Well, unless Naughty Dog is preparing to change the formula of these two series, then it seems to be something new.
Some PlayStation fans will hope this is about a Jax and Daxter revival, which you could imagine fitting this billing. However, this is just wishful thinking. With how much Naughty Dog games cost to make, it is hard to imagine a Jax and Daxter game will ever release again, at least from the California-based studio. The only option for this to happen would be for it to be a side project from a smaller team within the studio, which is possible, but again not likely.
All of that said, take everything here with a grain of salt. Right now, all we have is this cryptic rumor and speculation. As for PlayStation and Naughty Dog, neither has commented on this rumor. We don’t suspect this will change, for a variety of reasons, but if it does we will be sure to update the story accordingly.