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The Last of Us studio Naughty Dog recruits former God of War art director as hype builds for its unannounced next game

Rafael Grassetti, former God of War art director, joins Naughty Dog as art director, bringing his extensive experience to their next highly anticipated, player-freedom focused game, a potential departure from their previous titles.

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Former God of War art director Rafael Grassetti is back at PlayStation heading up the art team at Naughty Dog after a brief stint doing the same at Netflix.

Grassetti first joined PlayStation back in 2012 after working on Dragon Age 3 and Mass Effect 3 as a BioWare senior character artist. He then supervised the art teams on The Order 1886, Infamous: Second Son, and Killzone: Shadow Fall, before becoming principal artist at Sony Santa Monica for God of War, and then art director for God of War: Ragnarok.

He was fairly recently recruited by Netflix to head up the art department for its ambitious and talent-packed AAA studio, which was reportedly shut down in October.

Grassetti revealed on Twitter that he's now joined Naughty Dog, and his LinkedIn profile confirms that he's the studio's art director as of December 2024.

🐾 new chapter pic.twitter.com/97uKQ2YstIDecember 9, 2024

Naughty Dog has yet to reveal its next game, but there's certainly a lot of hype behind it after the success of, well, pretty much everything the studio has put out. It was reported in October that the next Naughty Dog jaunt is all about "player freedom," and studio head Neil Druckmann said in 2023 that he was interested in "trying something a little bit new, a little bit different, that not everybody's going to like."

Druckmann has also cited his interest in Elden Ring and Inside for the way they break from the traditional video game narrative structure, so it sure sounds like the next Naughty Dog game could be a pretty significant departure from the studio's previous efforts in terms of game design and storytelling, but only time will tell.

Find out which Naughty Dog releases made our list of the best PS5 games to play now.