The fourth installment in PlayStation’s much loved Uncharted action-adventure series is deep in development, and developer Naughty Dog has talked about the pressure the team feels to deliver something big.
Creative director Neil Druckman told Game Informer that the pressure on the Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End development team is mostly internal. “It comes from us,” he said, explaining that the team’s trying to create a game it will actually feel proud to play. “We’ve played the previous three Uncharted games, and if we wanted to play those, we’d go back to those,” he said. “But now we have a hunger, a thirst for something else. The pressure is trying to find that and trying to make sure all of those new systems work.”
Uncharted 4 releases later this year for PlayStation 4, but Naughty Dog hasn’t given a release date yet. It’s one of the standout franchises from the last console generation, and game director Bruce Straley expanded on how tough it is to make a blockbuster sequel that gamers expect so much from.
“It’s a fight making these games,” he said. “We’re wrestling with this thing, trying to find the fun, trying to make it on schedule, and [deal with] framerate and all these things. We want to be proud at the end of the day that all that fight was worth it.”
Druckman says that the biggest challenge is to keep the Uncharted spirit alive while still taking the game somewhere new: “Looking at the previous three games and really trying to understand and distill what Uncharted is about and finding its tone and spirit; honoring that and still trying to evolve it, still trying to take it somewhere else — that’s a big challenge, and that’s a big responsibility in a way. Making sure those characters are true to who they are.”
Druckman explained how team meetings will be getting tough before someone will simply say, “We’re Naughty Dog.” For Druckman, that means a lot: “We’re Naughty Dog — we’re going to try and make one of the best games out there.”