Uncharted 4: A Thief's End PS4

There are a fair few trends that the industry is obsessed with right now, but one of them is open worlds. Aside from maybe Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, pretty much all of the big games in 2014 traded on expansive sandboxes, with the likes of Destiny and The Crew even going as far as to populate those spaces with other online players. Asked if this was the inspiration behind Uncharted 4: A Thief's End's larger combat bowls, game director Bruce Straley shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't care what the industry's doing," he chuckled. "I want to make a game that I want to play, and that may sound selfish... I mean, I'm thinking about the team. Ultimately, though, we're not comparing what we're doing here to what other people are doing. We're comparing it to what's the evolution of Uncharted, and what can we do with this franchise? Who is Nathan Drake, and what can he do?"

He continued: "He's an adventurer, and when we're coming up with these story moments, we have these mechanics in mind, and we're saying, 'Well, in this area he's lost – he needs to find his way. What does that mean for the mechanics? What does that mean for the layout?' You as the player are lost as well, so we're trying to parallel those concepts together, and exploit those mechanics appropriately – that's the game that I want to play."

Creative director Neil Druckmann added that when the duo first came onto the project, there were some much bigger environments in the game, but it ultimately decided to tone those down. "There were some areas that were so big and so large that you lost any sense of pacing, and you weren't sure of where you were going. That's not something that we wanted to play, so there were some adjustments made."

He concluded that the developer's designing the release based on what feels right in the moment, and not trends that are occurring elsewhere in the industry. "There will be parts of the game that will be more linear than others," he hinted, "and parts that will open up much wider than what you've seen in [the PlayStation Experience] demo." If those big areas are all as intricately designed as the jungle that we saw last year, then this is going to be a very, very special title indeed.

[source gameinformer.com]