Naughty Dog Still Has Plans For The Current Generation

Developers Naughty Dog will wrap up Nathan Drake’s story next year with Uncharted 4: A Theif’s End. But if the studio’s community strategist Arne Meyer is to be believed, then the award-winning company is not through with this generation of consoles just yet.

Speaking with Finder, Meyer seemed relatively sure that, despite the current generation moving along at an alarmingly fast pace with Nintendo already providing developers with their new NX kits, Naughty Dog still have one or two titles in them to get out before the PlayStation 4 reaches the end of its life cycle.

“I’m sure there’s some big master plan somewhere, in terms of what the cycles are. We usually find out about the new hardware once they’re actually ready to give us development kits even if they’re early. We don’t know ahead of time when that cycle ends, we just have to focus on making the best game we can on the hardware we do have.

I mean I have no doubt – I don’t know what the timelines are – but we have at least one, maybe two games left in the console generation, maybe more. Clearly we can release a game really late in a console generation and do well, right?”

This all leaves fans with the obvious burning question: What could these one or two teased games be?

Well, for starters, it’s highly doubtful that Uncharted will follow the trend set by Naughty Dog’s earlier franchises where the main series is followed by a spinoff racing game. The gritty, blockbuster tone of Uncharted doesn’t really suit that idea as much as the likes of Crash Bandicoot and Jak And Daxter did.

Speaking of which, it is also (unfortunately) very unlikely that either Crash or Jak will be getting a revival anytime soon, as Meyers has also stated in the past that the company has moved on to stories grounded in realism. In other words, they’ve grown up and left the colorful world of anthropomorphic animals behind them, much to the sorrow of many gamers’ nostalgia.

The obvious answer would be the sequel to their phenomenal 2013 release, The Last Of Us, a game so ridiculously critically and commercially successful that not to do a sequel would be a huge missed opportunity. As of yet, there has still been no official confirmation of a follow-up, but comments made by Nathan Drake voice actor Nolan North seemed to suggest it is a certainty.

Even so, the developers would seem pretty hard pushed to get a sequel for The Last Of Us out in time for the PS4, as all reports suggest that it’s still in its very early conceptual stages and could still be many years away. This leads to another very exciting idea—that maybe Naughty Dog has another original intellectual property in the works that is yet to be revealed. From the studio that has brought us some of the best games of the last two decades, this is a very enthralling thought indeed.