Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet Targeting Mid-2027 Launch as Naughty Dog Orders Overtime: Report

Naughty Dog is hard at work on its next game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Revealed last year at The Game Awards, the sci-fi action-adventure title is believed to be a long way off from release. But a new Bloomberg report detailing development practices at the Sony-owned studio claims that Intergalactic is planned for launch in mid-2027. And to meet the target, Naughty Dog has reportedly mandated employees to work overtime.

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported Friday that Naughty Dog, the studio behind acclaimed Sony franchises like Uncharted and The Last of Us, had ordered mandatory overtime for its employees to finish work on a demo of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The developer has reportedly been pushing workers for the last seven weeks to work longer hours so that the demo would be ready for an upcoming internal review by Sony.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the report (paywalled) said that Naughty Dog staffers had been working at least eight extra hours weekly since late October. Naughty Dog is said to have missed several deadlines with Intergalactic, and the company has been pushing overtime to get production back on schedule.

Sony revealed the first trailer for Intergalactic at The Game Awards 2024 in December last year and shared some details about the game, promising Naughty Dog's “wildest, most creative story yet” and the “deepest gameplay” in the studio's history. According to the Bloomberg report, some teams at the studio worked long hours to finish the first trailer, too.

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet Targets Mid-2027 Launch

Since the trailer reveal a year ago, there has been no official word on the game; Naughty Dog and Sony have not confirmed a release timeline for Intergalactic yet. But industry insiders believe that the sci-fi title is a long way from release. Both Giant Bomb journalist Jeff Grubb and Schreier have recently claimed that Intergalactic will not launch in 2026.

The new report, citing people aware of Sony's plans, claimed that Intergalactic was slated for release in mid-2027 — that's perhaps not as far off as some previously thought. Naughty Dog employees reportedly fear that stricter overtime mandates could be imposed later in the game's development cycle.

For now, the overtime mandate, which required employees to report to office five days a week instead of three in addition to the extra hours, is reportedly winding down as work on the demo nears completion.

Intergalatic: The Heretic Prophet will put players in the shoes of a bounty hunter, Jordan A. Mun
Photo Credit: Sony/ Naughty Dog

Working long hours to get production back on track — a practice known as crunch — is common in game development, even as several big studios have attempted to address burnout in recent years. Rockstar Games, the developer behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises, overhauled its practices and culture to avoid crunch. Naughty Dog, too, has been known to ask its employees to work longer hours to finish a game.

The first-party PlayStation studio has not released a new game since it launched The Last of Us Part 2 on the PS4 in 2020. Since then, Naughty Dog has released a remastered collection of two Uncharted games, a remake of The Last of Us, and a remaster of The Last of Us Part 2. The studio was working on a multiplayer game set in the universe of The Last of Us, before it was cancelled to shift resources and focus to Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.