Bruce Straley, one of Uncharted’s fathers and co-director of The Last of Us, spoke to GamesRadar+ about how he would like a new hypothetical Uncharted 5.
Straley left Naughty Dog several years ago now and the software house itself does not seem willing to return to the franchise after The Last of Us Part II.
“I would love to play another Nathan Drake game, or even another game in that world with other characters,” he explained as one of the creators of the series. “I think that has a ton of potential still.”
Straley obviously sets conditions, including “the original concepts that we pushed for in UC2; keeping everything core, everything on the stick, all the set pieces playable, and so on. I’d also keep pushing UC into the realm of player choice, and keep seeing how that affects the adventure.”
Naughty Dog should wonder about “How do you make the player feel like they’re the ones discovering things on the adventure with Nathan Drake, rather than something that feels like the story relegates the player to play a certain way?”
Uncharted 5 should, therefore, allow you to “play an adventure with those characters and have real freedom – and I’m not talking about open world, per se, either. I think [Uncharted 4’s] Madagascar is a good talking point to start a conversation. To combine Madagascar’s level design with [Uncharted 2’s] set pieces, and then adding open choices onto that. The industry still needs well drawn characters and good stories that don’t take themselves seriously, like a lot of games tend to now in the triple-A space.”
The saga, according to Straley, has however much to say because “the industry still needs well-hatched characters and good stories that don’t take itself too seriously, as so many games in triple-A space tend to do now”.
The last release of the franchise goes back to Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, which in a sense mirrored this type of vision as it was of limited size compared to the rest of the chapters in the main series.
