Naughty Dog is drawn to Elden Ring’s narrative and wants to experience something new

Neil Druckmann, the vice president of Naughty Dog, said he was fascinated by the narrative style of Elden Ring and other titles such as Inside, which differ from the more explicit and linear one of the studio’s products. Precisely because of this interest, Duckmann also added that the team would also like to try and experiment with new approaches from the point of view of storytelling.

I’ve recently been intrigued by things like Elden Ring and Inside that don’t rely heavily on traditional narrative to tell a story,” Druckmann said in an interview with the Washington Post. “Some of the best storytelling in The Last of Us is in the cinematics, but there’s a lot also in the gameplay, in moving around an area and understanding its story just by looking at it and examining it.

For me right now one of the greatest joys is games that trust their audience’s ability to figure things out. Games that don’t hold your hand, these are the things that intrigue me looking to the future.

That doesn’t mean we’ll never have dialogue or cutscenes in the future, I think those are tools in the toolbox… And I think there’s a way to carry those things forward, at least for the kind of games we make at Naughty Dog. I’m really intrigued and once again we don’t want to rest on our laurels but try something a little new and different, which maybe not everyone will like, but that’s okay. And the stuff that we’re working on right now, I can tell you the teams are very excited about the various projects that we have right now at Naughty Dog.

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Obviously it still remains to be understood how FromSoftware’s environmental narrative will influence the next projects of the authors of The Last of Us and to what extent, but certainly Druckmann’s statements make us think of what will be the direction that the team intends to undertake in the coming years.

• Elden Ring’s Storytelling Style Inspires Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann (gamingbolt.com)