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Before either film had a proper screenplay, the writing team had already compiled roughly 60 pages of concepts and possibilities for how the two-part finale could play out. A lot of that never made the cut, but it shows how much was thrown at the wall.
Steve Wall, who plays Boholt, wasn't a fan of the East London-style accent the Reavers use in the games. Instead he based his own take on the character on the Slovakian fight choreographers he was working alongside on set, which is why Boholt sounds nothing like his game counterpart.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Ezio's mentor figure in the Italian Brotherhood, was a genuine Renaissance diplomat and writer widely regarded as the father of modern political science.
The original plan for Series One was six standard hour-long episodes. After the pilot was shot in that format, the BBC decided to turn it into more of a TV event and asked for three feature-length 90-minute films instead. Moffat's actually credited that change as one of the reasons the show survived as long as it did, since fitting six episodes around Cumberbatch and Freeman's schedules would've been brutal.
The bulletin board you pass early on the Pillar of Autumn is worth a proper read. Tucked among the notices is a callback to Bungie's old office address and a cheeky nod to Alien, complete with a missing cat poster for one Jonesy, the same name as the ship's cat in Ridley Scott's film.
Floyd's apartment, which Trevor breaks into during the story, is laid out almost identically to Melanie's apartment from Quentin Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown, right down to the furniture arrangement.
Instead of the usual photorealistic motion blur you'd get in modern CG, the animation team drew old-school smear frames by hand to sell fast movement, the same trick classic 2D cartoons used decades ago. It keeps every pose looking like a clean illustration rather than a blurry photograph, which is a big part of why the action reads like it's ripped straight off a comic page.
Slow down in the London pub at the very start of the game and have a look at the background props. There's a newspaper called The Overseer lying around with a headline about scientists struggling to understand a deadly fungus, a tiny throwaway prop most people never bother to actually read.
Whenever Drake or Elena suit up in wetsuits, the brand stitched on is 'Ottsel'. That's not a made-up label either, it's a wink at Jak from Jak and Daxter, who happens to be part of the ottsel species.
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.
