Electronic Thoughts – Uncharted HD Trilogy Rumours
One of the most recent tidbits to escape the rumour mill and catch my attention was the listing of the Uncharted Trilogy coming to PS4 by Swiss retailer cede.ch. Regardless of whether this is patently false, I’m going to go ahead and give you some reasons as to why I think this is a great idea.
To begin with, AAA development is expensive – Naughty Dog is a second party studio with relatively few IP’s, and each of their releases could be potentially make-or-break – Uncharted 4, even with the support of Sony, is surely going to cost a mint to make. Going back to the well so to speak makes financial sense, especially riding on the back of the success of The Last of Us Remastered – a port which by all accounts not only sold well but also allowed Naughty Dog to get to grips with PS4 development in a very low risk way.
Uncharted 4 has been pushed back into 2016 – not a surprising fact given the strains on AAA devs, as delays seem to be par for the course. However, if you’ll allow me to put my tinfoil hat on for a moment, this could be a calculated move by Naughty Dog as they pull strings internally to get some of their devs working on getting the Uncharted series up and running on the PS4. It would be a shame to see the experience gained from porting The Last of Us go to waste instead of being used to bring across the companies flagship brand.
This leads to the reasons The Last of Us was even ported over to the PS4 – apart from it being an easy way to chalk up one more exclusive in the then lacklustre PS4 library, it also facilitates the perception that many people who have purchased a PS4 have done so coming from other console backgrounds – namely, there are many PS4 owners who never owned a PS3, thus missing out on some of the best exclusives available in the final two years of the previous console generation. I suspect this will be a market increasingly catered to as time goes on (Demon’s Souls remaster please) and an Uncharted Trilogy would be the perfect way to introduce this group of gamers to Nathan Drake.
Have you gone back and played Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune recently? The game is almost 8 years old, and it shows. Of the three main series entries, it would most benefit from a bit of polish – heck, they could even finally fix the aiming in Uncharted 3 (not that I’m holding a grudge or anything). It goes without saying that Uncharted 2, while still having a few issues, is the standout entry in the series – much like The Last of Us, I’m sure there are many people who wouldn’t mind replaying it with some higher fidelity visuals. Heck, they could even remove the awful touch controls from Golden Abyss and chuck that in there too.
I really can’t see any downsides to this people – naysayers can always vote with their wallets, but with more recently released games receiving a ‘HD’ update, I won’t be surprised if more early PS3 and 360 titles begin to appear on current gen systems.
Stephen del Prado
