Page 1 of 4
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.
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.
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.
Run past a rooftop pool during one of the city chapters and jump in, and Drake will actually start playing a round of Marco Polo, a playful little callback to the explorer's role in the first game. Naughty Dog liked the joke enough to bring it back years later in Uncharted 4.
There's a trophy called Stage Fright that pops up in Chapter 11 if you just stand still for 30 seconds after a certain cutscene. It's Naughty Dog poking fun at themselves, referencing the famously awkward E3 2015 stage demo where the controller froze up mid-presentation.
Laura Bailey landed the role of Nadine Ross before the character's final look was locked in. A concept artist later sketched her as a Black woman, and Neil Druckmann liked the direction, but the team worried about backlash over a white actress voicing a Black character. It wasn't until they saw Bailey's actual performance that they decided it worked and kept her in the role.
This was the first mainline Uncharted where Greg Edmonson didn't handle the main score. Henry Jackman stepped in instead and wrote a new take on Nate's Theme, blending the old melody with a rougher, more piratey feel for a track simply titled A Thief's End.
