Despite being revealed at last year's The Game Awards, Naughty Dog's upcoming Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is reportedly still years away from launch.

Fans of the Uncharted and The Last of Us studio should also not expect another glimpse of the project at next month's annual video games award ceremony, it was claimed.

Discussion around when to expect Intergalactic was recently sparked by journalist Colin Moriarty, who suggested he thought it possible the game would launch in 2026. (After various sites picked up the comment as confirmation, Moriarty then issued a clarification to say he'd just been "speculating," though by then, the topic had snowballed.)

In March this year, in a conversation with 28 Years Later director Alex Garland, Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann said the developer still had "a ways to go" on the project. During the same month, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier stated that the game would not launch in 2026 (and neither would The Witcher 4, either).

This month, Schreier has now repeated this statement — once again placing Intergalactic's arrival as 2027 at the earliest, and potentially skipping the PS5 generation altogether. Meanwhile, Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb has claimed that the game won't be making a second appearance in trailer form at The Game Awards this year.

Is this a surprise? Not really. PlayStation (and Nintendo, and Xbox) have a habit of teasing blockbuster titles a long time before they're ready for most people to play them. And in an interview in May, Druckmann confirmed Naughty Dog was also working on a second game which he said he was acting as "more of a producer" and "mentor" on. Perhaps this game will be announced and launched first?

Still, the reminder that Naughty Dog's big new IP is still years away has come as a disappointment to some. Should Intergalactic launch in 2027, it will have been seven years since the launch of The Last of Us Part 2. During the PlayStation 3 and 4 era, Naughty Dog launched a trilogy of Uncharted games and the first The Last of Us within the same timeframe.

Of course, Naughty Dog has still launched new products over the past few years, including the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered — but these have been re-releases and remasters. At the same time, it has also abandoned its long-awaited multiplayer The Last of Us spin-off, which will now no longer see the light of day.

"I am all for letting devs cook but this is the absolute worst generation for Naughty Dog," one fan wrote on social media. "TLOU P2 dropped in 2020 and all we've gotten are barebones remasters, an unnecessary remake, cancelled multiplayer and waiting almost a decade for a new game."

Still, Druckmann has spoken confidently that Intergalactic will be worth the wait. Featuring a dark sci-fi story centered around the topics of faith and religion, the project will be led by a star-studded cast that includes Tati Gabrielle from the Uncharted movie as protagonist Jordan A. Mun, and Kumail Nanjiani of Marvel's Eternals as a man called Colin Graves.

In September this year, in an interview in which Druckmann described development as "firing on all cyclinders," the director branded his next project as "the most ambitious game we’ve ever made."

"It's the most expansive game we've ever made," he then teased, "[and] maybe the most expensive, by the time we finish it."

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social