Naughty Dog has gotten a lot of fame lately due to their excellent work on Uncharted and The Last Of Us. As a developer, they have shown that they are extremely capable of delivering on quality. Uncharted is the most successful I.P for Sony now and it’s interesting to read how the series evolved from its earlier concept to the final product that we know today.
In a great feature by IGN, Naughty Dog talks about the origins of the series and the ideas that they considered for it. According to Amy Hennig, Creative Director and Writer of Uncharted, they had considered setting Uncharted in an underwater complex at one point.
“We actually had one [idea] that was going to take place in an underwater complex,” Hennig admitted. “We’re really glad we didn’t do that one, because that would have been right at the same time as BioShock, and they did it much better than we would have. Theirs is just so sublime. We were going for something much more, not horror-based, but it was more of a sense of entrapment, the claustrophobia. We were going to play with a lot of water mechanics and that kind of stuff.”
One of the idea was to consider a post-apocalyptic setting, kind of like what they did with The Last Of Us. The only difference was that it would not contain horror but focus more on the post-apocalyptic aspect, as explained by Hennig.
We had an early idea – before Uncharted became Uncharted – that was almost a hybrid idea of The Last of Us and Uncharted. In hindsight, we were talking about being a kind of Nathan Drake figure, but in the future, and the relics he was looking for were the relics of our civilization, in this overgrown wilderness of the ruins of our world.”
“It was post-apocalyptic,” Hennig continued, “but not scary, in the sense that it was kind of a beautiful post-apocalyptic world, with its own dangers and all, but the beauty of nature reclaiming our architecture and our relics. I still think that’s a cool idea, but we went another way with that.”
Recently, rumors were starting to crop up that Naughty Dog’s next project would be set in space. While this turned out to be false now, since their next project is actually a new Uncharted. We can’t really discount the possibility of Naughty Dog trying an entirely new setting for their new I.P(If any) in the future. Since they have already went with post apocalyptic setting with The Last Of Us, maybe they will go with steampunk/sci-fic sometimes. Neil Druckmann explains how one of the concept for Uncharted was set in a victorian era with steampunk settings.
“There was a concept art folder,” Neil Druckmann added, “and I would keep going in there and looking at stuff. Early on, it was like this open world, Victorian era. It had a mixture of steampunk and flying vehicles. It was kind of a mishmash of a bunch of ideas. Then the main dude, I remember, he looked like Marty McFly from Back to the Future. He had this orange vest when I first saw him running around.”
There are certainly a lot of ideas and concept thrown around Uncharted. While we don’t know what is actually going to happen with Uncharted on PlayStation 4, we can definitely see some of these concepts making their way into the next Naughty Dog game.
What setting would you like to see in the next Naughty Dog game? Let us know in the comments below.
Stay tuned to GearNuke for latest news and info on Uncharted on PlayStaion 4.
