The Naughty Dog news has me optimistic about the PS5 again – Reader’s Feature

Uncharted 4 screenshot of Nate Drake — Uncharted 4 – apparently not the last one (Sony Interactive Entertainment)

As The Last Of Us and Uncharted developer Naughty Dog confirms they’re working on a raft of new games, a reader hopes it’s a turning point for the whole of PlayStation.

A couple of years ago, when people realised just how much Sony had lost its mind over live service games, people started talking about how the generation was being wasted and it was taking too long for new games to come out. At that point though everything that Sony did release, that wasn’t live service, was still really good, like Spider-Man 2 and Ghost Of Yōtei.

Now though, almost six years after the PlayStation 5 first came out, the situation is much worse, as the quality of the games becomes more unreliable – naming no names, Marvel’s Wolverine – and you realise how some developers have made practically nothing all generation.

Everyone knows games take long to make nowadays but Sony has done nothing to compensate for that. They haven’t tried to pivot to shorter games, they haven’t kept a cap on budgets, and they haven’t created new developers to help fill in the gaps. Neither has any other publisher, but not only is Sony meant to be an industry leader, but their whole PlayStation business has been badly hit by their refusal to react.

This week, we saw the first sign that maybe someone at Sony realised they’ve messed up. Well, maybe not Sony but definitely Naughty Dog. I’ll now list all the new games that Naughty Dog has released in the last six years, since the PlayStation 6 first came out, not including remakes and remasters:

Not a very long list, is it? A lot of the problem was The Last Of Us Online that got cancelled, although when that was supposed to come out is anyone’s guess. I wouldn’t be surprised if it still wasn’t out now, even if it had gone ahead.

Naughty Dog is Sony’s best developer. They’re who Insomniac wish they could be, and they set the standard for the whole Sony formula that other people are still trying to follow. Before this week we knew they were working on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, but that still doesn’t have a release year. So it might be a 2027 game and it might be a PlayStation 6 launch title, but we have no way of knowing.

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What we did learn, is that Naughty Dog is working on two new The Last Of Us games, which might include Part 3, but they didn’t say. And then straight after we got a lot of leaks, from usually reliable people, that they’re also making a new Uncharted game. Why they didn’t mention that is a mystery. Is it a surprise? Is it so far out they didn’t think it was worth saying? It’s impossible to tell.

What we can say is that after suddenly going from zero games in six year we now have four that they’re working on, at least two of which, probably three, a full-on big budget games. If only they could have made an annoucement like that years ago.

There’s a lot of negativity about the PlayStation 6 and I’m right there agreeing with it. Nobody is going to buy a £1,000 console no matter how much they love PlayStation. But I don’t think they’ll stop making PlayStation 5 games for a long while, if ever, so I think ultimately it won’t actually matter.

So while there is a lot to be pessimistic about in gaming at the moment, I do take this week’s only slightly bungled annoucement to be a positive. Perhaps even a change in direction that will see a turnaround for both Sony and maybe even the games industry at large.

If Sony hadn’t put them onto making The Last Of Us Online this all probably would’ve happened years ago but at this point I’m just glad it happened at all.

By reader Caspian