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Uncharted 4 | A Thief’s End
To end Sony’s press conference tonight, Uncharted 4 | A Thief’s End has been said to release in 2015. With the announcement comes the first official trailer featuring both Drake in all his glory, and in-game graphics that are bound to make even the coldest of men weep openly.
While we still know little about the title, it is reassuring to see Naughty Dog hard at work yet again, with another mindbogglingly beautiful project.
I fear that this may be the last we see of Uncharted if this trailer is to be taken literally, but we’ll have to wait for 2015 to see what mysteries await.
The Development
According to Wikipedia, the development of Uncharted 4 | A Theif’s End is detailed as below;
A 36-year-old man with curly black hair and a 37-year-old man with short brown hair smirking at the camera.
Neil Druckmann (left) and Bruce Straley (right) were chosen to lead development on Uncharted 4 as game director and creative director, replacing Justin Richmond and Amy Hennig, respectively.
Main article: Development of Uncharted 4 | A Thief’s End
Naughty Dog began developing Uncharted 4 | A Thief’s End in 2011, following the release of Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. The developer had split into two teams in 2009, to develop Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us concurrently; the former team, led by creative director Amy Hennig and game director Justin Richmond, began preliminary work on Uncharted 4 in November 2011. Hennig and Richmond led development for several years, until their departure from the company in March 2014. Shortly after, Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley were working on the game as creative director and game director, respectively; Druckmann and Straley had previously led the development of The Last of Us. Initial reports claimed that Hennig was “forced out” of Naughty Dog by Druckmann and Straley, though co-presidents Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra later denied this. After taking over development, Druckmann and Straley scrapped about “eight months of [Hennig’s] story”. They faced great difficulty after Hennig’s departure, due to the more limited development time and significant story changes.
Druckmann co-wrote the story alongside Josh Scherr. Tom Bissell and Ryan M. James also provided additional writing on the game, particularly contributing to companion, enemy, and multiplayer dialogue; Bissell and James also performed the game’s historical research. The writers challenged themselves to “tell a meaningful human story with complex relationships … in this more lighthearted drama”. The narrative pacing of the game was seen as a benchmark for several of its environments and gameplay beats. Despite adding some nonlinear gameplay allowing freedom and player decisions, the writers wanted to tell a specific story and explore specific emotional moments, avoiding features such as multiple endings. The game explores the theme of family: both Nathan’s surrogate family in Elena and Sully, and his blood family in Sam.
The relationship between Nathan and Elena was a central focus of the game’s development, as Naughty Dog attempted to humanize the former more than in previous games. The team considered Nathan as a reflection of their own mentalities; as they have grown older and matured, Nathan has also matured in age and wisdom. The game’s actors regularly contributed to the development of the characters; Druckmann found that the actors were more familiar with the character motivations, and took their advice while writing. Straley wanted to explore character relationships deeper than previous Uncharted games, taking inspiration from the story of The Last of Us. The announcement of Laura Bailey, a white actress, portraying the character of Nadine Ross, who is of Black South African descent, led to some backlash. Druckmann explained that when the character was conceived, her ethnicity was not yet determined; Bailey was chosen from the audition of casting calls from actors of several heritages. Druckmann also noted that a Caucasian character in the game is voiced by a black voice actor.
Uncharted 4 | A Thief’s End was Naughty Dog’s first original game developed for the PlayStation 4, having re-released The Last of Us for the console as The Last of Us Remastered in July 2014. Remastered allowed the team to become accustomed to the architecture, having previously suffered great difficulties switching from PlayStation 2 hardware to PlayStation 3 during development of Drake’s Fortune. The game’s texture resolution is at least four times larger than Uncharted 3’s. While the team initially aimed for the entire game to run at 60 frames-per-second,[39] restrictions in the environment limited the single-player mode to 30 frames-per-second; the multiplayer mode runs at 60 frames per second.
For the game’s environment sounds, the team performed outdoor recording; they ensured the environments “felt alive but not overbuilt” by introducing several ambient changes as players progress through the locations. The variation of in-game locations introduced several challenges for the team, as they attempted to make each location very different for players to feel as if “they were being propelled to different locations across the world”. The game also uses quadraphonic sound, which senior sound designer Jeremy Rogers described as more “intricate” than previous games, due to availability of memory while developing Uncharted 4. The game’s original score was written by Henry Jackman, with additional music by Alex Belcher, replacing former series composer Greg Edmonson.
Did you ever play Uncharted 4 video game. How was your experience with this game?
