Uncharted 4 Finale Needed A “Bit Of Work,” Naughty Dog Says

All good things must come to a close and for swash-buckling adventurer Nathan Drake, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End will be the proper conclusion fans have asked for, Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann says.

Since its original delay from late 2015 to the spring of next year, Uncharted 4 has taken up a great deal of the studio’s time, even sidelining its ideas for a sequel to 2013’s The Last of Us. It was a decision that it didn’t make lightly, says Druckmann.

“It was a very hard decision,” Druckmann said in an interview with Official Playstation Magazine. “The Last Of Us was the first game we ever delayed – by a month – and we felt so guilty and so horrible having to do that, and yet shipping a game that wasn’t up to our vision would have felt worse. Much of the development and figuring things out happens as we go. There were certain sequences where we were like ‘Okay, this is a pretty ambitious sequence, we will probably have to cut this…’

Having assumed creative control over the game with Bruce Straley following the departure of lead writer Amy Hennig and creative director Justin Richmond two years ago next March, Druckmann believes that the delay was in everyone’s best interests in order to deliver the series finale fans want.

“We were weighing those choices between fans and their expectations,” Druckmann says further. “It was going to disappoint them to push this thing back, but this is the last chapter for Nathan Drake, so let’s give ourselves as much time as possible and go all-out for this series.”

Just what the studio has in store for Drake’s last chapter is a secret Druckmann is keeping under wraps, but one that apparently needed “a bit of work” before it saw the light of day.

“Even when I’m describing the ending, it’s a pretty… Well, I guess this is a little bit of a spoil…” he continues. “Nah, I’m not going to say it! But there is something that happens that requires quite a bit of work for what we want it to do, and again we would have had to reduce that scope and reduce that ambition to meet that [original] deadline.”

Uncharted 4 will see Drake off for the final time on March 18th, 2016 as a Playstation 4 exclusive. A beta for its multiplayer mode will be launching this December.