It turns out that the story for Naughty Dog’s hotly anticipated Uncharted 4 was at one point completely different. Thing’s changed “100%” when new directors Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley joined the team, according to an AP interview given by Druckmann himself.
Back in early 2014, directors on Uncharted 4 Amy Hennig and Justin Richmond left developer Naughty Dog after having worked on Uncharted 4 for quite a while. There have even been reports that Hennig was forced out by the new directors, but Naughty Dog has denied this.
Druckmann and Straley worked on the first two Uncharted games, before moving on to something called The Last of Us. Never heard of it myself, but apparently it’s a pretty good game? Whatever.
No word on exactly what has changed in terms of story, but actor Nolan North revealed last year that a lot of Hennig’s work was scrapped.
North said:
[the development team] shot eight months of her story and it was all thrown away. Amy is still a very dear friend of mine and she’s brilliant. But the Last of Us guys were the next team there, so they took over and they just wanted their own flavor. They got rid of some of the other people that were involved and just re-did their thing.
Meanwhile, Straley said that Uncharted 4 is Naughty Dog’s most ambitious game yet, and Druckmann reiterated that this is definitely (probably) Nathan Drake’s final Uncharted adventure.
Druckmann said:
It’s time. Sometimes, a character just lets you know it’s time to move on. For me, that was part of the intrigue of coming back to this world. You never see something successful in the industry end. It usually just fizzles out.
Uncharted 4 is coming exclusively to PlayStation 4 at the end of April. If you hate the story, console yourself with the fact that there was another, completely different one floating out there somewhere.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.