Naughty Dog’s new game ‘Intergalactic’ stirs controversy with ‘Concord’ comparisons

Considering it’s the first Naughty Dog game in years that isn’t a remaster, remake, or a sequel, it’s a little shocking that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet’s trailer from last night‘s Game Awards doesn’t have more views on YouTube and more buzz online. Again, the title is a mouthful and not quite as catchy as Uncharted or The last of us.

The PlayStation version of the trailer has 587,000 views as of this writing.

Naughty Dog’s trailer has 449,000 views.

Both trailers become “relative” in terms of likes and dislikes. The former has 38,000 likes and 51,000 dislikes as of this writing. 29k/40k for the latter. And while Naughty Dog had comments turned off when the trailer went live — they knew this was going to be controversial – Sony’s trailer has comments enabled. They include such gems as:

“The trailer is 2 hours old? Wow, it’s so old we need a remaster”

“I feel like Will Smith is going to punch me for making fun of her.”

“Can I play as the characters from the background anime instead?”

“You can really tell that production started in 2020.”

“Somehow the Concord came back…”

“The most surprising thing about this trailer is that Sony left the commentary on.”

So why is this game already so controversial?

Mostly it’s the character design for the game’s main character, Jordan A. Mun, played by Tati Gabrielle. You will recognize Gabrielle from the Netflix series You and other shows, as well as one of the villains in the Uncharted Film. She has a role in season 2 of The last of us on HBO too, so her ties to Naughty Dog are clearly deep.

Critics of the trailer have called her character design “woke” and likened it to Sony’s recent failure, Harmony, which bombed so hard it was taken offline two weeks after launch. That game’s failure can’t be entirely blamed on “woke” character designs. Uninspired gameplay, derivative characters and many other factors contributed to the lukewarm response from the gaming community. But it didn’t help.

Personally, I very intensely dislike Jordan’s character design, although I’m not sure it’s as simple as saying it’s too “woke” although she certainly looks a lot like Lev from TLOU2. I find it strange, first of all, that the character is so much less attractive—and lighter-skinned—than Gabrielle:

The shaved head is also odd considering the “cassette futurism” aesthetic the game has going for it, which I really like a lot. I dig the CRT monitors, the CD player, the vintage red leather jacket, all of it, but the hairstyle seems completely out of place.

Of course, a shaved head seriously cuts down on processing power. Hair uses a lot of resources when it comes to rendering graphics, and a shaved head is just a lot less workload for the PS5 – assuming this launches before the PS6 comes out. Still, I wish we had some customization options here (and maybe we will!) This isn’t a game that Dark souls or Return where you rarely see the character’s face. You will spend a lot of time with this character in story scenes. Might as well have the option to fine tune.

Another reason this trailer is controversial is all the product placement for brands like Porsche, Adidas and – to a lesser extent, for obvious reasons – Sony. I am reminded of playing Hideo Kojima Death Stranding and find myself staring down the barrel of a load of Monster Energy Drinks, completely ripped out of the game’s otherwise coherent post-apocalyptic world. IN Intergalactic, Jordan has arrived on Simperia, a mysterious planet cut off from the rest of the galaxy, having traveled from an alt-Earth where space travel was a big deal in the 1980s. That explains the Pet Shop Boys CD and all that, but product placement is always scary and controversial, even if this was done to anchor the game to an 80s feel.

More troubling to me is the inclusion of recognizable celebrities, which also feels very much like a Hideo Kojima game in recent years, as Kojima has made it clear how much he values ​​celebrity (see, for example, replacing David Hayter as Snake in Metal Gear Solid V with Keifer Sutherland).

We see Kumail Nanjiani and Tony Dalton in Intergalactic trailer on top of the celebrity lead. Naughty Dog has traditionally created its own characters and used talented voice actors to play them. The success of The last of us franchise has clearly shifted the focus of the studio (the third game will completely reconstruct Joel and replace him with Pedro Pascal in all the flashbacks, just you wait). Game director Neil Druckmann takes page after page from Kojima, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing.

On the bright side, the aesthetics are definitely cool and the graphics in the engine we see in trailer0 are amazing even though we didn’t get any real gameplay. I love all those CRT monitors in the spaceship. I love that Naughty Dog is taking a step here, moving away from the “real world” stuff and going full sci-fi. I’m also really happy that the tone is a little less dour than the endlessly bleak TLOU2, though I’m worried that the “humor” here will basically be annoying, convoluted, MCU-esque dialogue. Even better, the soundtrack is written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the team behind the soundtrack to Gone girl and The social network. If nothing else, visually and sonically, this game is going to be incredible.

But I remain knowledgeable about the main character beyond just her appearance. The “smarty, know-it-all girlboss” is the new “grizzled white dude” when it comes to tiresome video game characters. It might not be Jordan, but that’s the vibe I get. And like many other players, I’m tired of being preached to, and it might not happen in the future Intergalactic, but it’s a valid concern at this point in AAA western video games. I don’t mind political themes in games, but modern politics – whether it’s right-wing identity politics or social justice identity politics – just breaks the immersion and makes a game feel instantly dated. We’ll see.