Feature: 5 Reasons Uncharted 4 on PS4 Will Live Up to the Hype

Naughty Dog, as lead designer Ricky Cambier illustrated in our interview earlier this week, is nervous. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is finished, but the developer doesn't know how people are going to respond to the game. That's because the studio prefers to push forward rather than stand still, and it's already admitted that the ending – an element that it's spent the duration of two full delays perfecting – is going to be divisive. But with expectations at astronomical levels both internally and externally, can the hotly anticipated PlayStation 4 exclusive possibly live up to the hype? Here are five reasons why we reckon that the outlook's good.

Naughty Dog's pushing on

Here's the thing: Naughty Dog could have made another Uncharted using the exact same blueprints as its predecessors and it would have been good – but we all expect more from the Californian company, and it seems like it expects the same from itself. With the upcoming Uncharted 4, then, it's evolving the formula that it's made famous over the past decade, taking Nate's buccaneering abilities and injecting them into bigger, more malleable environments. This is still the same action adventure that we've all come to know and love, but the addition of wider spaces means that it feels next-gen now. And that's an important anecdote seeing as the PS4 is rapidly approaching its third birthday.

It's the best looking PS4 game to date

Visuals are, honestly, the least important aspect of any game; if it's fun to play then it doesn't really matter how it looks. However, it's perhaps worth noting that Uncharted 4 is the best looking PS4 game we've seen to date. The art direction is spot on, adopting a vibrant colour palette that's befitting of Drake's often jovial jaunts. But the tech that Naughty Dog's pushing is equally impressive: environments, as already mentioned, are larger than ever before, and the attention to detail – from mud physics to facial animation ticks – is on another level. Such was the case with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves on the PS3, topping this technical feast is going to be incredibly tough.

The extended cast is intriguing

In the fourth instalment of the Uncharted franchise, we already know a helluva lot about Drake, Sully, and Elena. The introduction of Sam, the estranged sibling of Nate, is all the more important, then, because it promises to extract a lot more out of the seasoned protagonist. We reckon that the villains seem intriguing, too. We don't know a whole lot about PMC owner Rafe just yet, but Nadine Ross has the potential to hit heights that Helen Mirren imitator Marlowe and meathead Lazarevic could not.

Gunfights are more complex than ever

To piggyback off the first point, it's not just the scale of environments that Naughty Dog is revising with Uncharted 4 – it's also the way in which gunfights are paced. The stop-and-pop combat bowls of previous entries have been re-worked, allowing for much more versatility in your approach. Tall grass means that stealth is now a viable option, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the one that you take. You can also go in guns blazing, but the addition of the grappling hook means that you can cover more ground quicker than ever before. All of this, alongside what's shaping up to be some stellar level design, means that you'll have more options in combat than ever before – and that's one learning from The Last of Us that we were praying the developer would implement.

A thief's end

How often does a commercially successful series like Uncharted get left behind? In an industry dominated by sequels, it's exceedingly rare, so Naughty Dog deserves all of the credit in the world for concluding Nate's story. Sony may ultimately decide that it wants another developer to pick up the property, and that's its prerogative – but for Druckmann and his team, A Thief's End represents the big fat period at the end of a decade's worth of work. As such, it's hard to imagine that the studio would deliver anything less than its absolute finest work. Uncharted 4 will live up to the hype because, quite frankly, it has to.

Do you think that Uncharted 4 will live up to the hype, or are expectations simply too high? Swing into the comments section below, and let us know.