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Some of Uncharted 4's biggest open areas had to be scaled back because of time pressure. For The Lost Legacy, Naughty Dog restructured how it built environments, letting as many as five separate teams work on a single location at once so the game's big open space wouldn't suffer the same fate.
The Western Ghats hub area that Chloe and Nadine drive through wasn't just a bigger version of Uncharted 4's jeep sections, at the time of release, Naughty Dog described it as the largest open space the studio had ever put together for a game.
Tucked around the open-world Western Ghats section are eleven Hoysala Tokens, and hunting down every last one rewards players who fully explore the map rather than just racing to the next story beat.
Before settling on Chloe, Naughty Dog kicked around a few other ideas for who should lead this spin-off, including Victor 'Sully' Sullivan, Uncharted 3's Charlie Cutter, and even Cassie Drake, Nathan and Elena's daughter, who'd only been glimpsed as an adult in Uncharted 4's epilogue.
There was genuine internal discussion about making Cassie Drake the lead instead of Chloe. The idea got dropped for a few reasons: the team worried she'd feel too much like a Lara Croft clone, an adult Cassie suddenly gunning down mercenaries felt tonally wrong, and honestly, Nate and Elena would never sign off on their daughter living that life.
Partway through Chapter 8, after a nerve-wracking grapple swing off a crumbling tower, drop down into a small hidden nook below the branch instead of continuing on. There's a collectible plastic skull waiting there that you can shake like a Magic 8-Ball for a little fortune. It's the same Strange Skull toy that first popped up in The Last of Us: Left Behind.
This was actually a first for the studio in a different way too, it's the first time Naughty Dog ever pushed one of its own franchises to a fifth mainline entry, since their earlier series either stopped after one game or got handed off to other developers.
The game finally fills in a piece of Chloe's background that had only ever been hinted at before, confirming she's half-Indian and half-Australian, which gives her hunt for the Tusk of Ganesh a much more personal weight than just another treasure job.
Composer Henry Jackman, who'd scored Uncharted 4 the year before, came back for The Lost Legacy and wove regional Indian musical textures into his usual sweeping adventure sound to match Chloe and Nadine's trip through the Western Ghats.
The official soundtrack runs to nineteen tracks, running just over an hour, with titles like 'Chloe Frazer', 'The Western Ghats' and 'The Tusk of Ganesh' mapping neatly onto the game's key characters and locations.
