Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

• 1. Introduction

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  Uncharted 4: A Thief's End was already in strangers' hands on the 26th of April 2016, ahead of its official launch. Amazon had begun shipping copies early. The next day, a batch bound for retail stores in the United Kingdom was stolen in transit. Spoilers spread online, and the developers at Naughty Dog said they were disappointed in the people posting them. For a studio guarding the last chapter of a treasure-hunting saga, it was a bruising preview of the attention coming its way.

  The game is a 2016 action-adventure for the PlayStation 4 and the fourth main entry in the Uncharted series. Its hero, Nathan Drake, has already walked away from the life that made him famous. This documentary asks what pulls him back and what the trip costs him. It asks why a studio swapped its leaders in the middle of production, and what that change did to the people left behind. And it asks how a story about the damage greed does came to be ranked among the greatest video games ever made.

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• 2. Avery's Treasure

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  A hollow idol of St. Dismas sets everything in motion. Many years before the main story, Nate Drake and his older brother Sam break into a Panamanian jail with a partner named Rafe. They want the former cell of Henry Avery's first mate, and inside it Nate finds the idol. A warden who helped them demands a cut. Rafe kills him on impulse, the escape turns frantic, and guards shoot Sam. Nate and Rafe get away. Sam is presumed dead.

  Fifteen years later, Nate is living in New Orleans with his wife Elena Fisher, a journalist. He works for a salvage company and misses the thrill of the old life. Then Sam turns up alive. He says he survived the gunfire, spent the years in prison, and escaped alongside the drug lord Hector Alcazar. Alcazar, he claims, will kill him unless he finds Avery's treasure. Nate agrees to help and tells Elena he has taken a salvaging job.

  In Italy, the brothers and their mentor Victor Sullivan, known as Sully, steal a duplicate Dismas idol from an illegal auction. The theft sets them against Nadine Ross, who runs a private military company called Shoreline, and her employer Rafe, who never stopped searching. A map inside the idol points to St. Dismas's cathedral in the Scottish Highlands. There they find a hidden temple and a map marking King's Bay in Madagascar.

  At King's Bay, the group learns that Avery, Thomas Tew and ten other pirate captains pooled their treasures. Nate uncovers a map to Libertalia, a fabled pirate utopia. Elena finds them at their hotel. She is upset at the lie and at a brother Nate never mentioned, and she leaves. Nate sends Sully after her.

  The Drakes follow the map to an island and find Libertalia, along with signs of a civil war. The founders had carried the city's treasure across the island to New Devon, an extravagant and well-fortified town built for themselves. Rafe then corners the brothers and reveals that Sam has been lying. Alcazar died six months earlier. Rafe himself freed Sam from prison two years ago, and Sam double-crossed him to resume the hunt with Nate. As Rafe aims at Nate, Sam shields him and accidentally knocks him off a cliff.

  Elena rescues Nate, and he tells her about his past. As teenagers, he and Sam learned that their mother, a historian named Cassandra Morgan, was researching Libertalia. They broke into the house of a person connected to her and nearly got caught by police. They chose new lives and took the surname Drake, honoring her theory about the descendants of Francis Drake. In New Devon, Nate and Elena learn how Libertalia ended. The founders killed all the colonists and then turned on one another, until Avery and Tew poisoned them all.

  Elena, Nate and Sully free Sam and urge him to leave, but he chooses the treasure instead. Nate follows his trail to a cavern holding Avery's ship, still loaded with gold. Nadine has already gathered a large haul and refuses to risk more of Avery's traps. Rafe forces her on by bribing her men. Aboard, Sam sets off a trap that starts a fire and pins him under rubble.

  In the hold lie the skeletons of Avery and Tew, who killed each other over the treasure. Fed up with Rafe's obsession, Nadine leaves him there with the Drakes. Rafe challenges Nate to a sword fight. Nate cuts a rope tied to a bundle of treasure, and it crushes Rafe to death. Nate frees Sam, and the group escapes in Sully's plane.

  Sam pocketed some of the gold and gave it to Elena. Realizing she and Nate both need adventure, she buys the salvage company, makes Nate its owner, and plans to revive her old exploration show. Sam and Sully take a new job together. Years later, the couple's teenage daughter Cassie, played by Kaitlyn Dever, finds relics from their adventures, and Nate decides to tell her the whole story.

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• 3. A Change of Command

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  In 2009, Naughty Dog divided its staff into two teams so that Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception and The Last of Us could be built at the same time. The Uncharted team was led by creative director Amy Hennig and game director Justin Richmond. They began preliminary work on the fourth game after Uncharted 3 shipped in November 2011. Hennig and Richmond guided the project for several years, until both left the company in March 2014.

  Soon afterward, Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley were running the game as creative director and game director. The pair had previously led The Last of Us. Early reports claimed that Hennig had been forced out by them. Co-presidents Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra later denied it.

  The handover was not gentle on the script. Druckmann and Straley threw out about 'eight months of Hennig's story'. They also resolved that this would be the final Uncharted, because there was 'nowhere else' to take the characters. With less time and large story changes to absorb, they described the period after Hennig's exit as very hard.

  The pressure showed at the end of production. A report by Jason Schreier of Kotaku described an extended crunch of working days lasting twelve hours and more, and heavy attrition afterward. Fourteen of the twenty non-lead designers credited on the game left the company after release, a loss the report put at 70% of the team. Straley said he 'would never want to do Uncharted 4 again... Because now we've lived through that'.

  Straley himself left shortly after release, following a sabbatical. Schreier suggested that the exodus slowed work on the studio's next project, The Last of Us Part II, which arrived in 2020 with few veterans left on the team. Druckmann, for his part, said the story asked whether a person can 'balance passion versus settling down', and he pointed to the toll crunch took on the developers' own lives.

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• 4. Family and Greed

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  Josh Scherr was the writer the team called 'the funny one'. Druckmann wrote the story alongside him, and he enjoyed the partnership after writing The Last of Us mostly on his own. Tom Bissell and Ryan M. James contributed historical research plus dialogue for companions, enemies and multiplayer. The script was built with a dialogue designer, so different lines play depending on what the player is doing.

  The writers wanted 'lighthearted drama' that still told a meaningful human story with complex relationships. Their guiding idea was that 'every treasure has a cost', along with the question of how far someone will go to save the people they love. Family, both blood and surrogate, runs through the plot. The fates of Avery and Tew carry a warning about greed and obsession. The team felt the subtitle A Thief's End could apply to several characters, including Rafe and the pirates.

  The ending was constructed early in development. An epilogue was added later so that players would not be left with open questions. Straley called the resolution 'satisfying' and 'right for the franchise'.

  Two bedrooms bookend the game. User interface designer Alexandria Neonakis designed both Nathan's orphanage room and Cassie's room, working with Druckmann on lighting and dressing. Nathan's room is stark and empty. Cassie's has soft lighting and is crowded with posters and childhood items. The contrast shows how differently the two grew up.

  Nolan North, Emily Rose and Richard McGonagle returned as Nathan, Elena and Sully. Their performances were mostly captured with performance capture technology, with remaining audio recorded later in a studio. Other roles changed hands. Alan Tudyk, first cast as Rafe, left because of the narrative changes, and Warren Kole took over. Todd Stashwick, first cast as Sam, worked on the project for at least six months before leaving in April 2014. Troy Baker replaced him. Graham McTavish was set to return as Charlie Cutter before the character was cut.

  Baker is younger than North, yet he played the older brother. He compared the dynamic to his friendship with the actor Travis Willingham, whose life experience made Baker look up to him. Baker and North already shared a playful bond, and both found a sibling rivalry between the brothers, each trying to outsmart the other. North said the constant animosity was hard to play given his closeness to Baker, while the 'brotherly love' came easily. Druckmann saw Sam as a past version of Nathan, 'a way for Nathan to reflect and see what he was and why it's so important to mature and change'.

  The Nathan and Elena relationship was the center of development. When Elena travels with Nathan later in the game, the team removed the vehicle so players must cross the ground on foot, creating a closer bond. A scene in which the pair hang trapped in a net was meant as a metaphor for drawing them together. They cooperate to escape and then reconcile over the absurd situation. Druckmann described Elena as 'a very strong person who loves Nathan very much'.

  Nadine and Rafe were written so that neither sees themselves as the villain. Straley said Nadine's view of the treasure as money let the team show other sides of Rafe, who is personally attached to the discovery. Druckmann considered Rafe a reflection of Nathan's ego. Evelyn, played by Merle Dandridge, became so consumed by treasure hunting that her family life shrank, a parallel to Nathan and Sam. She was originally an old English man.

  Casting Laura Bailey, a white actress, as Nadine Ross, a character of Black South African descent, drew backlash when announced. Druckmann explained that the character's ethnicity had not been set when she was conceived and that Bailey was chosen from auditions open to actors of many heritages. He added that a white character in the game was voiced by a Black actor. Concept artist Ashley Swidowski created Nadine's look, using Druckmann's curly hair as a reference.

  Swidowski also pushed Druckmann to add more women to the cast. Druckmann said the critic Anita Sarkeesian influenced his story too, including the decision to make Drake's child a daughter rather than a son. When a focus tester objected to such changes, Druckmann told him to leave and answered, 'Wow, why does that matter?'

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• 5. Wide-Linear Play

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  Technical art director Teagan Morrison estimated that the game offered 'maybe ten times the size... of explorable space' compared with earlier entries. Druckmann called the result 'wide-linear'. He said 'it's not open-world, because we wanted to tell a very specific story, with very specific tension'. In his view, open-world games lose tension because players are free to forget the main objective, and he prefers to 'control the pacing'.

  Inside that design, each area offers several routes to an objective. The challenge was keeping players focused on the larger goal. Nathan can jump, sprint, climb, swim, edge along narrow ledges, swing on a rope and fire a grappling hook that lets him leap gaps and gain an edge in fights. Some stretches put the player behind the wheel of a vehicle. The team added more problem-solving to the climbing without stalling the story.

  Combat can be loud or quiet. Players have rifles, shotguns, pistols, revolvers, grenades and dynamite, and they can ambush enemies or sneak past them. The melee system was reworked to avoid quick time events. Enemies react to what the player does, coordinate tactics and cooperate with each other. Allies are controlled by artificial intelligence as well.

  A dialogue tree lets players pick how some conversations go, though the choices never change how the story progresses. Points collected in the main game unlock extras, including a zero-gravity mode, bullet time and a cel-shaded art style.

  Crash Bandicoot, the 1996 game, nearly missed its cameo. The team wanted to feature it, but legal disapproval met the idea at first. They started work on a different old-school game instead, until negotiations let Crash Bandicoot in.

  Up to ten players can fight in the online multiplayer, in recreations of single-player settings, using characters from the series. There are five modes. In Command, players capture sites to earn points. Ranked and Team Deathmatch are both deathmatch modes. Plunder is a capture-the-flag mode in which players seek an idol, and in Trials players cooperate to defeat non-player characters. Treasure found on maps buys items and weapons.

  Multiplayer adds supernatural power-ups called Mysticals. The 'Wrath of El Dorado' damages every opponent standing beside it, while the 'Cintamani Stone' heals players and their teammates. Players can also summon Sidekicks. Hunters immobilize the nearest opponent, Saviors provide medical support and ammunition, Snipers guard locations with a sniper rifle, and Brutes attack with a heavy machine gun. In December 2016, a cooperative survival mode arrived, in which three players fight waves of enemies that grow steadily harder.

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• 6. Faces, Light and Sound

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  Nathan Drake's face in this game runs on 800 bones. In earlier games, his entire body skeleton used 250. Faces can form more than 850 expressions, compared with 120 in Uncharted 3. It was the studio's first game to capture facial performances with head-mounted cameras and facial markings. Close-ups now show wrinkles and skin pores, and cutscenes run in real time rather than as pre-rendered video, so play and cinematics blend without a seam.

  Remastering The Last of Us for the PlayStation 4 in 2014 let the team get used to the console's architecture. The studio had struggled with its earlier jump from PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3 for Drake's Fortune. Druckmann felt the new hardware drove the team's creativity rather than limiting it. Texture resolution is at least four times that of Uncharted 3. A physically based rendering pipeline, which models how real materials respond to light, was used for the first time. Parallax occlusion maps give depth to surfaces such as bricks and roof tiles. Skin shading uses subsurface scattering on character faces.

  The team first aimed for 60 frames per second throughout. Limits in the environments held the single-player mode to 30 frames per second at 1080p, while multiplayer runs at 60. A PlayStation 4 Pro enhancement in November 2016 raised the resolution to 1440p, using a bespoke upscaling method instead of checkerboard rendering. The PlayStation 5 version offers up to three modes depending on the display. Quality mode targets native 4K at 30 frames per second. Performance mode runs 1440p at 60. A 'performance plus' mode targets 1080p at 120. A September 2022 update added variable refresh rate support on 120Hz displays, with an unlocked rate of up to 50 frames per second in quality mode and 90-110 in performance mode.

  Henry Jackman wrote the original score, with additional music by Alex Belcher, replacing the series' former composer Greg Edmonson. Jackman and Sony's senior music manager Jonathan Mayer co-produced it, and an orchestra recorded it at AIR Studios in London. The soundtrack appeared digitally on the 10th of May 2016, the day the game launched. A vinyl edition from iam8bit followed on the 12th of May, and a CD from La-La Land Records on the 17th of May.

  The game holds about 55,000 lines of recorded dialogue, and its cinematics run for roughly 165 minutes. Audio lead Phillip Kovats said 'it's not a very static world at all... the emotion is built up within the ambience'. The team recorded outdoor sounds and varied the ambience as players move between locations. Walking through a bush sounds different depending on speed and the type of bush. Senior sound designer Jeremy Rogers described the quadraphonic mix as more intricate than in earlier games, because more memory was available.

  The in-game Jeep proved a puzzle. The team traveled to California and Nevada to record a Jeep crossing real terrain, and recorded tires on different surfaces at a foley stage. Each tire reacts to the surface and its own pressure, so several sounds can play at once. For the grappling hook, Rogers recorded a bullwhip made by David Morgan, the craftsman behind the whips used in the Indiana Jones films. He considered it an homage to that franchise.

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• 7. Delays and Promotion

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  On the 14th of November 2013, Sony officially acknowledged a new Uncharted by releasing a trailer. The debut trailer carried the voice of Stashwick and showed an ancient map of Africa that stopped at Madagascar, where Île Sainte-Marie is marked. The full title was unveiled on the 9th of June at Sony's E3 2014 press conference. Journalists had speculated for months, citing Naughty Dog job listings and apparent retailer leaks.

  In September 2015, Naughty Dog announced that the game would miss its intended late 2015 release and arrive on the 18th of March 2016, to allow more polish on the ending. It slipped twice more for polish, first to April and finally to the 10th of May.

  A Sony marketing manager called the game 'PlayStation's largest ever software investment'. The first gameplay cinematic appeared at E3 2015, with Nathan and Sully ambushed before chasing after Sam. A trailer titled 'Man Behind the Treasure' played before some screenings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and featured a piano version of the Pixies song 'Where Is My Mind?'. Druckmann called the story trailer, released on the 24th of February 2016, 'the best trailer in Naughty Dog's history'.

  That trailer caused one embarrassment. Ubisoft's Aymar Azaïzia noticed it included a piece of art from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. Naughty Dog swapped it out in a new version and apologized to Ubisoft.

  Players could try multiplayer early. A beta ran from the 4th to the 13th of December 2015 for owners of Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, and an open beta ran from the 4th to the 7th of March 2016. Pre-order buyers could pick a Special Edition with a SteelBook case, a hardcover art book and multiplayer unlock codes. The Libertalia Collector's Edition added a statue of Nathan Drake. Sony also sold a 500 GB PlayStation 4 bundle with the game and Uncharted 4-branded DualShock 4 controllers.

  After launch, Naughty Dog announced single-player downloadable content, encouraged by the success of The Last of Us: Left Behind. That grew into Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, a stand-alone expansion released in August 2017, starring Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross. Sony's May 2021 investor presentation revealed a Windows version, and in September the studio announced the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection. It reached PlayStation 5 on the 28th of January 2022, and Windows on the 19th of October that year, developed with Iron Galaxy. In some regions, buying or upgrading through the PlayStation Store also granted a voucher code for a ticket to the film Uncharted.

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• 8. Acclaim and Sales

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  Metacritic summed up reviews of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End as 'universal acclaim', and the game is the joint sixth-highest rated on PlayStation 4. Lucy O'Brien of IGN called it 'a remarkable achievement in blockbuster storytelling and graphical beauty'. Mike Mahardy of GameSpot named it a 'breathtaking marvel of a game'. Dan Ryckert of Giant Bomb judged its graphics the best on any console. Several critics saw it as a worthy end to Nathan's story.

  Some reviewers disagreed on specifics. Leon Hurley of GamesRadar felt that Sam and his backstory crowded the narrative. Stephen Totilo of Kotaku thought Sam was 'more of a plot device for others to react to than a compelling character on his own'. Keith Stuart of The Guardian found the linearity immersion-breaking, and Steven Burns of VideoGamer.com felt the story had too much padding, though he still thought it the series' best. On multiplayer, critics were generally positive but felt the single-player mode came first. Ryckert called it 'basic' and doubted players would stay long.

  Awards followed. At the Game Awards in 2016, the game was nominated eight times and won two: Best Narrative, and Best Performance for North. The D.I.C.E. Awards gave it ten nominations and four wins, including Adventure Game of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Story. At the 2017 SXSW Gaming Awards it took five of eight nominations, including Video Game of the Year. The Writers Guild of America honored its videogame writing, and at the 13th British Academy Games Awards, which gave it eight nominations, it won Best Game.

  Within seven days of release, the game sold more than 2.7 million units, making it the fastest-selling first-party PlayStation 4 game. In the United Kingdom, first-week sales were 66% higher than for Uncharted 3. In Japan, it topped the charts with over 128,000 units in its first week and sold 21,000 more the next. The game sold 8.7 million copies by December 2016 and over 15 million by May 2019. Internal data leaked in 2023 put the total at 18.616 million by February 2022.

  Within five years, 37 million players had tried the game. Of these, 13.3 million played multiplayer and 9.5 million used accessibility features. The 2022 Uncharted film takes inspiration from A Thief's End. A 2024 study in Physiology & Behavior also used the game. Fifty-four male participants were randomly assigned either a violent or a non-violent section, and those who played the violent sections showed decreased stress levels.

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