Twenty years after a fungal infection obliterated most of the U.S. population and turned the victims into infected monstrosities, Joel is tasked with escorting Ellie to the Fireflies to help reverse engineer a cure. This isn't easy for either of them, since Joel has been left almost permanently bitter after the death of his daughter, and Ellie is distrusting of him.
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One of the game's more macabre little jokes is a skeleton carrying a Firefly dog tag, the same faction symbol from The Last of Us. Nobody ever explains how it ended up in a remote corner of the Uncharted world, and that's kind of the fun of it.
Same bedroom, another hidden reference: a poster reading 'Starlight Savage 2: Coming Soon.' Starlight Savage is the fictional comic series Ellie is obsessed with in The Last of Us, quietly tying the two worlds together on a kid's bedroom wall.
Naughty Dog rebuilt its facial animation system from scratch for this game. Where faces in The Last of Us and Uncharted 3 relied on roughly 90 to 100 animation points, Uncharted 4's characters use somewhere between 300 and 500, letting the team capture far subtler expressions.
