Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann Working On a New Story, New IP?

Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann is apparently working on a new story involving time travel, but will it be a new game, or a personal project?

Neil Druckmann, the critically acclaimed director of Naughty Dog’s “Uncharted” and “The Last Of Us” games is apparently working on a new story, according to South Carolina radio station 89.3, “The Frame.”

According to Druckmann the story focuses on time-jumping, much like Remedy Entertainment’s own “Quantum Break”, which released last year.

Naughty Dog has earned a reputation for amazing storytelling with both the Uncharted series (which wrapped up earlier this year) and The Last Of Us, a 2013 post-apocalyptic action game. With rumors of a new Last of Us game in the works, Druckmann has taken some focus away from that to talk about his own new story.

According to Neil Druckmann himself, the time-jumping story will revolve around a number of characters that jump back into the past to change events. Unfortunately he didn’t disclose more than that, but it sounds like an interesting plot, especially given the praise that Quantum Break’s story got.

Going by previous logic of time-traveling plots, the story will likely include both future and past gameplay as the characters first change something in the past, then go back to the future, find that things have gone wrong, then head back to the past to change it.

Another thing that Neil Druckmann didn’t talk about was what sort of medium the story would be in. Would it be a book? A new game? Or is this just a concept for a story that might be used in the future?

Considering Druckmann works for Naughty Dog and they might be able to make such a concept be a masterpiece of storytelling, but considering Druckmann also writes books on his own he could also be writing it independently of the studio.

We’ll likely discover if Naughty Dog is actually using that concept for its own at some E3 a few years from now, but if Druckmann uses it for a book of his own we’ll just have to be on the lookout for it when he’s done.

Hunter is senior news writer at SegmentNext.com. He is a long time fan of strategy, RPG, and tabletop games. When he is not playing games, he likes to write about them.