Naughty Dog’s Release Schedule Is Unsustainable, Says Last of Us Designer

“No. Absolutely Not.”

Benson Russell, who worked on The Last of Us Part 2 and Uncharted 4 before leaving Naughty Dog, doesn’t think the studio can keep operating the way it has been. Asked directly whether Naughty Dog’s release structure is sustainable, he didn’t hedge. “No. Absolutely not,” he said, speaking on the FRVR Podcast.

“They’re one of the key stakeholders that get PlayStations sold, right? So, when you think about it, they have not put an original IP out on this platform. The only thing they’ve done is The Last of Us Remake.”

The math backs up his concern. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Naughty Dog’s next game, entered development back in 2020, right at the start of the PS5’s lifecycle, with recent rumors pointing to a 2027 release window. With PS6 currently expected around 2028, that would mean Naughty Dog ships a single original game across the entire generation, one that has a real chance of launching as a cross-gen title in the process.

Scope Creep And Siloed Teams

Russell has theories about why Intergalactic is taking this long, though he’s careful to frame them as guesses rather than inside knowledge. “My immediate hunch is that it might be another Last of Us 2 situation where you made this decision to put this 10-hour side quest in and it didn’t really fit the story, right?” he said, drawing on his own pre-production work on that game.

He also pointed out that Intergalactic’s sci-fi setting and hack-and-slash combat are both new territory for the studio, recalling that even melee combat in the Uncharted games got shortchanged in favor of polishing gunplay because building out real brawling “was a massive investment.”

Since leaving Naughty Dog, Russell has moved into consultancy work through Unhandled Exceptions, helping studios cut down bloated production schedules. He described one project, which he didn’t name, that has been in development for seven years and restarted three times, hampered by an internal structure that leaves teams disconnected from the point of what they’re actually building.

“Their internal structure promotes massive siloing, as in here’s a group of people that have no idea why they’re working on what they’re working on,” he said. At another unnamed studio, he described open “animosity between departments” split into isolated groups he called “little ponds.”

A Missing North Star

Russell’s core argument isn’t really about AI or tooling, it’s about direction. He believes most modern AAA games get greenlit without a clear sense of what they actually are, forcing teams to spend years discovering the game’s identity mid-development rather than defining it up front.

“I genuinely think these seven-year projects, you can get them back down to five,” he said, pointing to how earlier Naughty Dog projects worked backward from a clear story-driven North Star rather than starting with scattered, borrowed mechanics from other games.

He compares the pattern to Duke Nukem Forever, a notorious 14-year development saga defined by restarts and unclear direction, arguing plenty of modern games are edging toward the same territory without realizing it. On AI specifically, Russell draws a clear line: he doesn’t want generated final assets in games, but sees legitimate time savings in AI handling tedious tasks like retagging existing human-made objects.

Even then, he’s skeptical it solves the actual problem. Structure and planning, not tooling, are what he thinks determine whether a game ships in five years or spirals into seven.