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For The Taken King expansion, Bungie replaced Dinklage with veteran voice actor Nolan North, best known for Nathan Drake in Uncharted. Remarkably, North didn't just voice new lines, he re-recorded every single piece of Ghost dialogue from the original base game so the whole experience would feel consistent.
Scattered copies of a fictional newspaper called The Daily Metro pop up across the game, and if you stop to actually read the headlines, one of them is a proper gem: 'Uncharted 13: A Lush Movie — Justin Bieber as Drake.' Naughty Dog poking a bit of fun at their own flagship franchise.
There's a rundown pub you pass through called O'Sullivan's, and the layout is a deliberate callback to the bar brawl that kicks off Uncharted 3. The name itself is a nod to Victor 'Sully' Sullivan, Nathan Drake's long-time partner in crime.
In Serenity Apartments, right after you meet Henry and Sam, take a look around the bedroom - there's a Jak & Daxter plush on the dresser and a Nathan Drake plushie on the bed. The remake even throws in a second Drake plush for good measure.
After Uncharted 2 wrapped up in 2009, Naughty Dog didn't just move on to another sequel - they split into two teams. One half stayed on Uncharted duty for Drake's Deception, while the other half went off to build something completely new, which eventually became The Last of Us.
Poke around the vault in the Seattle bank during Day 1 downtown and you'll find a drawer with an engraved ring sitting inside it. It's the same ring Nathan Drake wears throughout the Uncharted series, a nice little wink from Naughty Dog to their other flagship franchise.
Among the various costumes and outfits players can dig up during their scavenging runs is a full Nathan Drake Halloween getup. It's become one of the most talked-about crossover finds in the whole game, mostly because it looks ridiculous on Ellie.
During the same scene where Ellie picks up a ring engraved with 'Sic Parvis Magna,' another Uncharted callback, she and Dina end up chatting about Point Break, the 1991 bank-heist movie with Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. Two references stacked into one quiet conversation.
For the Amazon ruins section, the team actually sketched concept art of Sully getting swarmed by spiders as a potential obstacle. It never made it into the finished game, but the idea didn't go to waste, since something very similar turned up years later in Uncharted 3.
While the bulk of Naughty Dog was heads-down on Drake's Deception, a second smaller team inside the studio was quietly working on something completely different in the background. That project turned out to be The Last of Us. It's the first time in the company's history they'd split like this, and it's kind of wild to think both games were cooking at the same building at once.
