Page 3 of 4
The Uncharted 4 that shipped isn't the one that started production. Longtime series writer Amy Hennig and Uncharted 3 director Justin Richmond both departed partway through, and Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, fresh off The Last of Us, were brought in to take over and reshape the project.
Under Amy Hennig, the early version of the game leaned much harder into stealth and traversal, with Nate not even carrying a gun at the start, just his grappling hook and climbing gear. It was reportedly a deliberate attempt to dial back the gun violence that earlier Uncharted games had been criticised for.
Graham McTavish, reprising his role as Charlie Cutter, and Alan Tudyk had already filmed scenes for the earlier version of the game before Amy Hennig's departure. Once their contracts were voided along with the change in direction, neither character made it into the final release.
Before Troy Baker took over the role, Todd Stashwick was cast as Sam Drake and even appears as the character's voice in the very first teaser trailer. When the game changed direction, Stashwick was quietly replaced.
Merle Dandridge pulls double duty in this one, voicing and performing both Evelyn and Sister Catherine, two characters who never share the screen at the same time.
Henry Avery isn't a Naughty Dog invention. He's built on the real historical figure Henry Every, a 17th-century English pirate whose exploits were so notorious that he became one of the most wanted men on the planet.
The historical Henry Every is credited with pulling off what's considered the most profitable pirate raid ever recorded, ambushing a Mughal treasure convoy in the Arabian Sea in 1695 and walking away with a fortune worth tens of millions in today's money.
The pirate utopia at the heart of the game's plot is drawn from old, mostly unverified legends about a real pirate colony called Libertalia, said to have been founded in Madagascar and run on ideals of liberty shared among its outlaw residents.
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.
This was actually the first Naughty Dog project built with a dedicated facial capture setup, separate from full-body motion capture, a shift that helped push the studio's cinematics closer to photorealism than anything they'd made before.
