Neil Druckmann Discusses Bringing Nathan Drake’s Journey to a Close in Uncharted 4

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End will be bringing Nathan Drake’s journey to a close, but that journey won’t just be about chasing treasure. According to Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, Uncharted 4 will also be focusing on the relationships Drake has formed through the series. In an interview with GameSpot during E3 2015, he said:

Well our approach has been, the first three games were the set-up, and if we were to do one more, how would we top it all off? How would we bring Nathan Drake’s journey to a close? Everything we’re doing is constructed towards that; Bringing closure to a very long journey.

That journey isn’t about just chasing treasure, it’s also about your relationships you have formed along the way.

When asked why the company would want to make another Uncharted game after the third one, especially since The Last of Us gave it a chance to build a new story, Druckmann said that working on Uncharted 4 is “freedom.”

So, that was the constraints of The Last of Us, and working on Uncharted 4 in some ways is freedom. As you can see in the demonstration, we can really go big and just have fun with it. In the real world, being dragged along by a jeep would probably kill you, but in Drake’s world, he lives off of this stuff.

Speaking of developing for the PlayStation 4, Druckmann said that getting new hardware was like having a “rug pulled from under us.” He said that the PS3’s memory was one of its main limitations and although the PS4 resolves that problem, the new hardware brings with it different kinds of challenges. He also said:

I guess that working on The Last of Us Remastered really helped us. It allowed us to port our engine over. Because the hardest thing with working on new hardware is it takes so long to get something on the screen, and then get something on the screen at a good enough frame-rate so that we can analyse how it plays.

So, just doing The Last of Us Remastered helped. I mean, Uncharted 4 was rough at first, but now we feel we’re at a good place. There’s still a few more things we have to still add in, but most of the mechanics are in, and we’re now iterating on them.

Uncharted 4 will be out on the PlayStation 4 in early 2016. You can read some facts about the game here, and our E3 2015 preview here.

[Source: GameSpot]