We all know Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End was a troubled project.
You may recall the game was originally announced alongside the launch of the PS4, with Amy Hennig at the helm. But she left Naughty Dog several years later, and The Last of Us duo Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley were parachuted in to save the project.
Now, courtesy of an interview with senior lighting artist Gabriel Betancourt, we’re finally getting a little insight into just how f*cked the project was.
In fact, according to his recollections, it sounds like Sony threatened to pull funding on the project if it wasn’t fixed.
It’s really important to point out that Betancourt never mentions Uncharted 4 or any particular employee by name, but we know he worked on the game and he talks about the “fourth project” in a successful series here. Go figure.
Speaking with Kiwi Talkz in a YouTube interview, he remembers:
“I remember this one game prototype, and I won't say which one, but there was a project that had been in production for two and a half years, almost three, and corporate had basically said, ‘We're having questions about this.’ And the franchise was successful up until that point. There was no reason to question this thing would be successful. But, at that time, the leader was surrounded by people who were always saying yes, and they were living in the glory of their success going onto their fourth project.”
Apparently, another director was asked to review the project, and they concluded that it “sucked”. This prompted a strong response from “corporate”, in this instance Sony, who effectively threatened to cancel the game.
Betancourt continues:
“Corporate looked at it and they said, ‘You guys are in trouble. We're going to pull funding from this if you guys don't fix this.’ And as a result, the director of that project was pulled away – even though they had been successful – and the naysayer along with two others were put in to help fix it, and then the game had to be redone. But then, two and a half, three years later – so going on five to six years total of production – the game became a success.”
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End was a massively successful game for both Sony and Naughty Dog, earning a 93 rating on Metacritic and selling millions upon millions of copies.
However, Straley would soon leave the developer, citing burn out and stress as a reason for his departure.
It’s interesting to learn just how close to the edge the studio was; a Naughty Dog game that “sucks”, given its track record, is just unthinkable. It’s also incredible how Druckmann and Straley were seemingly able to turn its fortunes around.
We would later get a standalone expansion in the form of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, but the franchise has been dormant ever since.
Earlier this year, returning director Shaun Escayg appeared to tease a new game on his Instagram account, so it’s assumed we haven’t seen the last of Uncharted just yet.
We hope that initial Uncharted 4 prototype leaks one day, because we’d love to know what was wrong with it and why it garnered such a strong reception from those within the studio – and Sony at large.