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The name Billy Midnight is a reference to Robert Ford, the real outlaw remembered for shooting his own gang leader Jesse James in the back. He's one of several characters scattered through the game built around real names from Wild West history.
Every mainline Uncharted game opens with a quote from a real historical explorer. This is the first one in the series to skip that tradition entirely, since the story doesn't really tie back to any single famous adventurer the way the others did.
Early drafts of the script had Ultron travelling to Wakanda himself to steal the vibranium he needed. That idea got dropped in favour of introducing the arms dealer Ulysses Klaw as the middleman instead, which is why Klaw ended up being the one holding a stash of the metal for Ultron to take by force.
After meeting Niccolò Machiavelli, returning to the Palazzo Auditore courtyard and using Eagle Vision triggers a one-time-only vision of Ezio's entire deceased family standing around the palazzo.
Christopher Lee had been reading Tolkien's trilogy once a year since it was first published in 1954, right up until he died in 2015. He's also the only cast member who actually met Tolkien, having crossed paths with him in an Oxford pub years earlier.
Beneath the iconic wizard's tower of Karazhan, the developers hid a giant smiley face in the terrain. It's normally buried, but relogging near the tower or clipping through rubble at the right spot reveals it grinning back up at you.
The guard line mocking players about a stolen sweetroll is rooted in a character-creation question going all the way back to 1994's The Elder Scrolls: Arena, where a gang of children demand the player's sweetroll in an alleyway, a scenario that shaped starting stats and later resurfaced across nearly every mainline Elder Scrolls game.
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.
Uma Thurman was offered the part of Eowyn but passed on it. Miranda Otto took the role instead, and Thurman later admitted she regretted saying no.
Months before release, huge chunks of the story and cutscenes leaked online, and the fallout was genuinely nasty. Abby's voice actress Laura Bailey ended up receiving death threats aimed at her newborn son, serious enough that some had to be passed along to authorities, and Abby's face model Jocelyn Mettler was reportedly still fielding hate mail years after the game came out.
