u/shawak456

For reasons that'll become clear, I don't think the wait for TLOU P3 will be as long or as excruciating as some people are suggesting. I think we're about to get another iconic 2013-2020 like Naughty Dog run. Hear me out.

Naughty Dog has always delivered a game every two to three years. If you look at the timeline of their modern game era (some call it the Neil Druckmann era), TLOU was released in 2013. Then, three years later, we got Uncharted 4 in 2016, which had a very troubled development; they had to redo a lot of things after Neil and Bruce took over. Then, in 2017, Lost Legacy was released. And after three years of that, in 2020, we got TLOU P2, their biggest game yet.

Now in 2020, Sony pumped a lot of resources into live-service games due to the COVID spike in gaming, and that's when things started going south. The multiplayer game took a lot of resources away from ND's pre-production of Intergalactic, and this is one of the biggest reasons, IMO, why it is taking so long for ND to put out Intergalactic. Yes, they also remade TLOU P1 in-house, but that would've been a very small team with external studio support, as hinted by Shuhei Yoshida in an interview with Kinda Funny.

All of this rambling is for this. We know Intergalactic is a 2027 game, and if rumors are true, we also know that the next Uncharted game has been in development for 3 years, and because the principal ND team is not developing U5, I think U5 is a smaller-scale project compared to Intergalactic or TLOU P2.

So, here's me smoking copium laced with hopium: I think, after the release of Intergalactic in 2027 (assuming it's not gonna slip into 2028. There are a lot of assumptions in this post because I'm trying to get high), the production would shift to finishing U5, and because it would've been in development for three-four years already by a small team, and the ground work would've been laid, keeping in mind it's a smaller scale game compared to main-line ND games, I thing it'll take another 2-3 more years for us to get U5 after intergalactic. And because by then, by late 2029-30, Neil and the team would've laid the groundwork for TLOU P3, since after intergalactic's release, as U5 is not Neil's project, he's only a top-level producer on it (we know this through one of his comments on an interview), ND will shift to producing TLOU P3. And, it's safe to assume that TLOU P3 will be a very large-scale game, as it's the baby of the studio's president, so it might take longer than the usual 2-3 years of full-scale dev time. I'd bet 4 years.

If you think this is too much copium laced with hopium to smoke at once, remember, ND developed U4, a 10-yo game that still stands shoulder to shoulder with current AAA games, in 4 years, even after scrapping almost a year's worth of development, and most of TLOU P2's development started after Lost Legacy's release in 2017 (source, Grounded 2 doc).

So here is the timeline in an ideal situation:

• In summer or late 2027, we get Intergalactic.
• Uncharted 5's release window would be 2029-30.
• And finally, we could get TLOU P3 between 2032 to 34.

Whatever happens, ND is going to release banggers in the next decade.