On 18 March 2016, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End will finally hit PS4. Matthew Pellett tracks down creative director Neil Druckmann and writer Josh Scherr to find out why Nathan Drake’s final outing will change the gaming landscape forever
Why is Uncharted 4 going to be the best Naughty Dog game ever made? That’s what you came here to find out, which is why it’s the first question we put to creative director Neil Druckmann when we discuss the concluding chapter of PlayStation posterboy Nathan Drake’s adventures.
“I guess because it’s the latest Naughty Dog game!” laughs Druckmann, clearly at ease with the levels of anticipation circling Naughty Dog’s first original game to appear on PlayStation 4. “I don’t know… Every game that we make, we have this big experienced team that we’ve been working with for years now, and we’re evolving and constantly pushing ourselves; learning how to tell stories in this relatively new medium.
“We’re getting more confident in telling more nuanced, more subtle types of stories. And then also what we’re learning, specifically with Uncharted, is how we get more of that spectacle. That bombastic action. This was always the philosophy for Uncharted: how do we make you feel like you’re inside a summer blockbuster?
“Now, with everything we’ve learned through the Uncharted games and everything we’ve learned with The Last Of Us, we feel like we can raise the spectacle and also tell a grounded, more personal, more intimate story to really dig deep into who Nathan Drake is as we close out his adventure.”
Speak with most developers who work on action-adventure games such as Uncharted and they’ll begin by spending minutes evangelising their game’s combat or world or the game mechanics, but for Druckmann it all begins with the story.
“As a writer/director, I have to find what is the heart of this thing,” he explains, “and since I’ve started work in this industry that’s always been the case. Story’s what I gravitate towards, and everything is built around that. And I want to make it clear there’s a separation for me between story and writing. When I say ‘story’ I don’t mean the script and the dialogue. It’s about what is this thing that we’re creating?
“So, for example, in The Last Of Us it was this relationship between two characters, and how do we, through an adventure, get you to feel the love of a parent and a child? That’s through cinematics, through gameplay, through music, through performances, through our graphics… everything is revolving around that concept.
“With Uncharted 4, as we were building it we were realising more and more what the theme is: it’s that balance between pursuing your passions and being with the ones you love, and what happens when you have to choose between those two things. Is there a way to reconcile that? That’s the message of this game, and everything is constructed around that very simple concept.”
BURIED TREASURE
“The whole process starts with developing the story outline,” says Josh Scherr, former lead cinematics animator for the trilogy and now writer of Uncharted 4. “We usually refer to it as the Macro. With the Macro you come up with the broad strokes of the story: who the characters are, what their particular arcs are going to be, what their relationships are to each other.
“And then – because it’s an Uncharted game – you’re also figuring out who’s the historical figure or what’s the historical artefact they’re going to be going after, and what locations are they going to be going to in the search for this. So the early days are kinda fun because not only are you trying to figure out a cool new story for your characters to live through, but you’re also doing some historical research and trying to dig up some cool artefacts for everybody to be chasing after.”
So far in the Naughty Dog games we’ve searched for the fabled El Dorado (not, in fact, a city of gold but a golden sarcophagus) in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune; sought out the magical kingdom of Shambhala and the treasured Cintamani Stone in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves; and hunted the Iram Of The Pillars in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. In Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Drake’s seeking none other than pirate haven Libertalia, and for Scherr it was, out of all the historical mythologies the team could have picked from, the most obvious legend to focus on when wrapping up Uncharted’s tale.
“Libertalia was this legendary pirate colony and, in all likelihood, it didn’t actually exist. One of the only places that it’s mentioned is in this old book called A General History Of The Pyrates, which was written by one Captain Charles Johnson who some people believe was a pseudonym for the author Daniel Defoe, writer of Robinson Crusoe. A lot of what we know about pirates comes from this book, but a lot of the information from this book is, in all likelihood, completely apocryphal or just outright bullsh*t!
“But taking a step back for a second, one of the things that drew us to doing pirates in general is also what it represents. Pirates have had this universal appeal to people – it’s this idea of this romantic adventure. A life at sea, raiding ships, taking gold and living large. For most people in the 16th and 17th [and 18th] centuries, reading about pirates was their form of escapist entertainment, like a fantasy that they could indulge themselves in. Libertalia was the ultimate representation of that fantasy.
“The idea with Libertalia was that it was a place where ‘Every man is born free and is free to breathe whatever air he desires regardless of his status, his social class, his rank or anything else like that’. They all shared their property and their goods; their treasure and money was all collected into a common treasury… It was this paradise where every man was equal and formerly wealthy aristocrats lived among freed slaves. It was this idea of a perfect society.”
LIBERTALIA CITY
The links to Uncharted, says Scherr, are obvious. “Most people in this world are condemned to living these fairly ordinary lives, eking out their success where they can. They have to live within the laws of the land, but pirates escape the laws which govern us. They’re free spirits who live by their own rules; ‘Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!’ and all that sort of thing.
“That’s also a lot of what Uncharted is about. It’s this escapist fantasy and it’s going to these fantastical places. A lot of it dovetails back in with our story. Nathan Drake, after Uncharted 3, has stepped away from his life and he and Elena have both agreed that they are going to attempt to live normal lives. But at a certain point when his brother Sam comes back into his life, Drake’s sort of drawn back into things.
“So the thing that we keep coming back to is the idea that every treasure has its cost. You can pursue this life, but there’s going to be a cost to it, and you have to live with the consequences of the choices that you make. And the fact of that matter is, whatever the fantasy is, the real life of pirates was very tough and often cruel. They spent a lot of their lives at sea, a lot of them got scurvy, they’d be constantly pursued by the authorities; if they set foot on land it’s very likely they’d be caught and hanged for their crimes… So there’s the romantic ideal and then there’s the reality, and that was kind of the draw of Libertalia because it was sort of the ultimate deal.”
FAMILY MATTERS
That concept of balancing passion and ties, of treasure and cost, is a deeply personal one for Druckmann. Having grown up in Israel, Uncharted’s director taught himself English by reading and playing videogames such as Sierra’s classic King’s Quest adventures, and those latter experiences directly contributed to him pursuing a dream to work in the gaming industry. This dream took him across the world, away from his homeland, and to Naughty Dog’s Californian HQ.
“You kind of hit the nail on the head there, which is, I think, why I’ve personally gravitated so much towards this concept,” says Druckmann when we highlight the similarities between Uncharted 4’s theme and the decisions he’s had to make during his own life. “It is a struggle. I grew up with games, and since as far back as I can remember just being able to tell great stories in games is something that means a lot to me. But it has come with great sacrifices along the way.
“Luckily I have a support system of family, but it has definitely tested us and sometimes relationships are strained because of it. At times you do have to make some pretty hard choices, and there are sometimes things at work that I have to miss for the family, and sometimes the job requires me to miss certain family things.”
And Druckmann isn’t alone. “I think most people who do pursue a job that they love, whether it’s something in a creative field or a technical field, make certain sacrifices,” echoes Scherr. “This is not a nine-to-five kind of workplace, you know? People here are very dedicated and very passionate about what they do, and sometimes – particularly as a project nears its end – that means that they’re putting in some long hours, and it’s hard!
“A lot of my work here and at home is about trying to strike a balance in my life between pursuing something I love and then being with the people I love. There’s definitely some resonance of that in the story of Uncharted 4.”
Originally, of course, that story was supposed to conclude imminently, but back in March Druckmann took to the Official PlayStation Blog to announce that A Thief’s End would be pushed back to 2016 – 18 March 2016, to be exact, though that release date is a much newer revelation.
“It was a very hard decision,” reflects Druckmann. “We pride ourselves on shipping on time. You see so many game projects that get delayed endlessly over and over – one year it’s announced then it’ll come out several years later. The Last Of Us was the first game we ever delayed – by a month – and we felt so guilty and so horrible having to do that.
“And yet we knew that despite how bad we felt with that decision, shipping a game that wasn’t up to our vision would have felt worse. And that’s kind of the decision we came to with Uncharted; so much of the development and figuring things out happens as we go, and there were certain sequences where we were like ‘Okay, this is a pretty ambitious sequence, we will probably have to cut this…’
“Even when I’m describing the ending, it’s a pretty… Well, I guess this is a little bit of a spoil… Nah, I’m not going to say it! But there is something that happens that requires quite a bit of work for what we want it to do, and again we would have had to reduce that scope and reduce that ambition to meet that [original] deadline.
“So we were weighing those choices between fans and their expectations. It was going to disappoint them to push this thing back, but this is the last chapter for Nathan Drake, so let’s give ourselves as much time as possible and go all-out for this series.”
END OF AN ERA
The fact that Uncharted 4 is the end of Drake’s story is inescapable. Naughty Dog has never shied away from that truth, going as far as to write it in the game’s title. “What makes a good ending?” repeats Druckmann when we ask him that very question. “Hmm. I’m just going to steal from Robert McKee – his book is like my bible for what makes a good classical story – [and say] a good ending is a payoff. The entire story is setting up this final message, and it ties it all together and it gives you a sense of closure.
“And if things are left dangling, they’re left dangling for a reason. Not to set up a sequel, but they’re left dangling to raise interesting questions about the theme of what it is you’ve just experienced.
“The other thing is that an ending needs to be, on one hand, surprising, and yet, in hindsight, inevitable. When you look back at it, it should seem really obvious that everything led to that point, and yet when it happens you should not be able to guess exactly how things are going to play out.”
Drawing a line under Naughty Dog’s most successful series to date is a bold move for the studio, but there’s no doubt in the team’s minds that A Thief’s End has a duty to be the true finale for the series.
“It’s very important,” continues Druckmann. “That’s one of our goals for this game; to wrap up Nathan Drake’s story. If you look back on the series you’ve seen this guy mature. With Uncharted 4, we’re really trying to answer questions like ‘What is it that made this guy become who he is?’ and ‘Can that person ever change?’ and ‘Is it possible to get out of that cycle or not?’ We have to definitively answer those questions if we’re approaching the end [of Drake’s journey].”
Even though creative director Neil Druckmann and game director Bruce Straley temporarily parted ways with Nathan Drake after Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (rather than working on Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception they instead headed up development on The Last Of Us), the gravity of A Thief’s End’s, well, end isn’t lost on the duo.
“We get more and more that feeling of this definitely [being] the end of an era for us as a studio,” says Druckmann. “We’ve been with this franchise for almost ten years now from inception all the way to this point. Luckily, we don’t get too much time to dwell on that feeling because we’re so busy, but every once in a while… you know?
“I remember when Bruce and I came onto the project. A few weeks later we pitched a pretty new story to the team, kind of like a new direction for the project. A lot of things were pretty rough and just slotted in, so there was an ending but it wasn’t as well defined, and at some point we defined more of the [plot] thread and a more definitive ending, and we did a second pitch for the team.
“You could tell people in the room were just getting emotional as we were discussing the specifics of how this series is going to end. That was one of those moments where you felt the excitement and anticipation for our fans to experience this, but a little bit of sadness because it’s ending. The other day we finished motion capture with Emily Rose (Elena) and Richard McGonagle (Sully), and some people got teary-eyed in the room because they’ve been part of this project for many, many years now and it’s wrapping up.”
NORTH REMEMBERS
Back in June at the Metrocon convention, Nathan Drake voice actor Nolan North also talked about this shift in plot, suggesting a hefty slab of work (as much as eight months’ worth) was lost with this change in direction that came as part of Druckmann’s and Straley’s new pitch. So was Uncharted 4 always intended to be the end point before this reset?
“Until things are pinned down then it’s never definite. I guess when we work on a project we’re constantly having concepts and ideas, and we might say whether a certain character is going to live or die. We play with all those ideas, and I think at some point even on Uncharted 3 we were saying it was going to be the last one, but then it shifted and it didn’t become that.
“But once we put the pins in those things, it became very real. We’d been discussing it throughout production [about how] it’s going to be the last one, but when we said ‘Well, here’s exactly how it’s going to happen and we’re committing to this and here are the scripts for it’ then all of a sudden it’s like ‘Oh, this IS the end for Nathan Drake’.”
For Josh Scherr, who remained on the Uncharted series when others moved across to develop The Last Of Us, saying goodbye is even harder. “By the time we ship I’ll have been working on this series for a decade, which is a little bit more than one fifth of my life at this point. I’ll let you do the math,” he chuckles.
“Anyhow, there’s a lot of poignancy there as we’re tying up some loose ends and answering some unanswered questions about [Drake’s] past and about his possible future. We’re definitively ending Nathan Drake’s tale, and just that alone makes me a little bit sad. But I think the fans who have been with us particularly from the beginning are going to be satisfied with the way we wrap things up.”
PIECE BY PIECE
“I guess our approach in the past has been to go bigger,” mulls Druckmann as conversation shifts towards Uncharted’s classic set-pieces. “You saw that evolution from Uncharted 2 to Uncharted 3, but with this one we felt like if we went any bigger, it would become comical; we would become a parody of ourselves. So it became really about how do we make them unique? How do we make them more playable?”
At E3, Naughty Dog showcased some of Nate’s new driving skills in demo that escalated and escalated until Drake was sucked into an epic, load-free car-chase/vehicle-top-shoot-out/post-crash-QTE/into-the-screen-escape combination that left us all breathless. Just don’t expect every set-piece in Uncharted 4 to be quite so frenetic.
“What we did with The Last Of Us was we constantly went small, quote-unquote, with the set-pieces. They became these very intimate sections. So you had Joel when he’s injured and he’s stumbling: that’s still a set-piece.
“I keep telling this story and people don’t believe me, but the photobooth in Left Behind, and the pictures that Ellie and Riley take – that took as much work as the collapsing building in Uncharted 2 as far as man-hours and resources. It’s this really small moment, if you were to look at it and compare it to a film, but for us it’s like: we have so many resources, so how do we best allocate them? Yes, we’re going to have big spectacle setpieces, but the thing that The Last Of Us and Left Behind gave us is the confidence to create these small, intimate moments where there isn’t a threat of death, but it’s another way to get to know the characters through interactivity.
“Those are really, for us, just as exciting as what you saw at E3; the big spectacles. I’m excited to see how fans react to that new balance of spectacle versus intimate [moments].”
Mention of Left Behind is especially apt for Uncharted 4, because while The Last Of Us’ celebrated DLC chapter was the first ever slice of single-player expansion content Naughty Dog had ever created, it’s now no longer the only chapter. That’s because Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End will also support story DLC post-release.
“Left Behind was the very first story DLC we ever embarked upon,” says Scherr, referencing the lessons learned by those members of the TLOU team who designed Left Behind and are now back on Uncharted.
“Some of the things that we weren’t sure about were length and value for money: how much we were going to charge for it, what kind of budget could we do and what did the budget provide us in the way of opportunities and limitations? Really, though, what it boiled down to was we do what we always do: we make the game that we want to make, and then we hopefully try and do a better job of doing that again the next time.”
BEYOND BEHIND
“One thing that was nice about Left Behind was that there was a little bit less pressure on the team than there [would have been] with developing a new IP. The Last Of Us was very, very stressful and very difficult to create, but it got such a fantastic response that the team felt more comfortable in taking a couple of risks [with the DLC].
“So in addition to the story content you had all these little experimental moments: moments of branching dialogue, and long stretches where there was no combat. Just Ellie and Riley slowly making their way through the mall, trying on masks.
“All of these moments of interactivity that ordinarily we might have done in a cutscene, we tried to make interactive. And the fact that a lot of it worked and really resonated with people is really encouraging us to continue to try doing a lot of those things. It was really just like making a big game on a small scale, and now that we know what’s involved in making something that size, hopefully whatever mistakes and mishaps we may have made making Left Behind… we’ll be able to avoid those and make some brand new ones!”
Mistakes? Mishaps? Scherr says those words with tongue firmly in cheek, and rightly so. Such was the peerless quality of The Last Of Us (last year tens of thousands of you voted in our 100th issue poll to crown it the greatest PlayStation game of all time), expectation for Uncharted 4 is sky-high. So how does Druckmann, whose last two projects were Game Of The Generation duellists Uncharted 2 and The Last Of Us, cope with that overwhelming expectation?
“That pressure is always there, I think. There was something nice with Uncharted 2: we were kind of under-the-radar. I don’t think anyone expected Uncharted 2 to be what it was. After that there was this mounting pressure, and I remember during the development of The Last Of Us it could be crushing at times, because you’d want it to be so good.
“Now? You feel it for so long you start becoming numb to it. And then you realise there’s nothing you can do. Awards are outside of your hands. Reviews are outside of your hands. It’s a subjective thing – people are going to think whatever they want to think, so all we can do on our end is make the game that we want to play.
“And for us, we evolve as developers. We evolve as gamers, so our tastes are different now than they were when we made Uncharted 2, or even when we made The Last Of Us. It’s [about] knowing that we’re gamers and trusting our gut, and letting that drive us and not worrying about anything else. Hopefully the other people who play it have similar tastes.”
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
As for seeing how people react to Uncharted 4, that process has already begun. As far as Druckmann is concerned, the game doesn’t begin on 18 March 2016 – it began way back at E3 2014 when we first saw Nathan Drake washed up on that gloomy beach.
“I believe that what the player sees before they play sets up a certain expectation, and that’s going to affect how they approach the game and the kind of enjoyment they’re going to get. From the moment you see the first trailer and the first demo, that’s already part of the experience. And so I try and have as much say in that as I can and push for certain things.”
This philosophy isn’t a new one for Druckmann, who has experience in mapping out what players are exposed to even years before a game is released with The Last Of Us.
“With The Last Of Us I was really vigilant about certain things like ‘We’ll never reveal that you’ll play as Ellie’ and that ‘Past this certain chapter, no one’s allowed to show anything in a trailer’.”
But those plans aren’t limited to what is and isn’t shown – for Naughty Dog, these trailers are little games in themselves that can deliberately subvert the pre-release player dialogue.
“We purposely deceived [players] with certain trailers. There was even, in one of The Last Of Us’ story trailers, a shot where Joel’s on the floor and he looks kind of sick and he turns up. That shot was made just for the trailer. Just to make it look like he’s infected or there’s something wrong with him, and then it’s juxtaposed with a shot of Ellie holding a gun, so everyone’s like ‘Oh my God, Joel’s going to turn and Ellie’s going to have to shoot him at the end!’ That was constructed in such a way so that people would guess that and think that that’s the obvious ending, and then we could turn it on them.”
Does that mean you shouldn’t believe what you see in Uncharted 4’s demos? “Now maybe I’ll show you the real thing so you think it’s not the real thing and it will be the real thing!” Druckmann laughs when we begin spiralling down the conspiracy rabbit hole. “But we’re very conscious about what we want to show in gameplay, what we want to show as far as story goes, and then we have like a spoiler list of ‘Here are the things we’re never going to talk about and we’re never going to show’ because we want them to be completely fresh when you play the game.”
One thing that’s not on the list? “I pretty much convinced him at one point that somebody in the game should be stabbed instead of shot,” quips Scherr about the scripting process. So heed that warning, readers: watch out for pointy objects while on your adventures…
THE END IS NIGH
Of course, 18 March won’t be the end of the story. Literally. That aforementioned DLC episode means work on Uncharted 4 is going to stretch a little further into 2016, although Scherr already has his release day mapped out. “With the story DLC coming up we’re [eventually] going to be jumping into that to try and make that something cool, but on 18 March I think I’m probably going to be playing our game on my own TV at home, letting my wife see why I disappeared for a couple of months!”
And when it’s all over, DLC and all? What does Druckmann hope people will take away from the Uncharted saga, and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End in particular?
“First and foremost I hope people are entertained. If we fail on that level then nothing else kinda matters. Have we created something which is engaging? That’s the most important thing for when we make one of these games.
“Beyond that, hopefully they are moved emotionally in some way. In The Last Of Us I was thrilled to read about people’s experiences with the ending and how they wrestled with certain philosophical ideas. Even people talking about their relationship with their kids or their loved ones, and how the game made them reflect on their real life.
“As an artist, I think that’s the greatest compliment, even if people disagree with maybe what the message is. The fact that they got the message, and that it inspired them to get angry on a forum about how they feel about Joel or something else.
“I’m hopeful that with Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, similarly people will look back at their lives. Whether it’s music that drives you or wanting to make videogames or wanting to make films, everybody has a certain passion that they feel they will shrivel up and die if they don’t pursue this thing. And at the same time, you’re trying to find partnership or a soulmate or whatever it is, and you can’t always have them both.
“I hope people leave the game talking about that.”