I’m a massive fan of the Uncharted series. You could say I’m somewhat “obsessed” with Naughty Dog’s seminal action-adventure series. I’ve played each game all the way through at least three times, and that includes the PS Vita exclusive Uncharted: Golden Abyss.
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is top of my list of games for 2015, I’ve pre-ordered the game from Amazon – I never pre-order games.
So why do I want Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End to be the last in the series? I’m a man who loves stories, and all good stories must end at some time, including Nathan Drake’s.
Each Uncharted game to date has drawn me in with their cinematic gameplay and fantastic aesthetics, the globetrotting Nathan Drake is one of the best action-heroes that the gaming industry has ever produces. Likeable, charming, funny and superbly portrayed by veteran voice actor Nolan North, it’s hard to imagine why Naughty Dog would ever hang up his holster and call it a day. It will happen though, and sooner rather than later.
I love me a good series, whether it be a film trilogy (or saga in the case of Star Wars,) television programme (currently addicted to Elementary) or video-game franchise, I’m just a lover of stories, have I mentioned?
Something I’ve noticed about long-running series’ is that the longer they go on for, the higher the likelihood of them becoming stale and uninteresting, something I found with the real-time thriller 24.
The first few series were interesting and had me staying up well into the early hours of the morning, but after series 6 it all started a little too familiar. The plot twists were expected and predictable, the scripts were nowhere near as strong and the overall sense of ‘it’s been done before’ loomed over my favourite series. Didn’t stop me bingeing on 24: Live Another Day though…
The point is, I hate to see my favourite stories become shadows of themselves, ruined by being dragged out for the sake of it. It becomes easy to get stuck in a rut, just look at Travellers Tales, they’ve made nothing but LEGO games for nearly 10 years and whilst the games are still fun, they’re more or less the same. Then there’s Call of Duty. It’s been around since the early 2000’s and I’ve played each one vigorously. I play for the campaign and occasionally dip into the multiplayer, but over the years the focus has been shifted to multiplayer and the story has been left in the dust, reduced to B-movie material. If the same happened to Uncharted, I think I’d probably weep a manly tear. Just the one. But it’d be manly as hell.
As much as I’d love to be playing a new adventure from the exciting life of Nathan Drake, I’d prefer to get some closure on the character. It’d be nice to see a video-game character have his story definitively end. Maybe he and Elena get married and have kids. Maybe Sully finds a huge stash of antiques in a recently deceased family members attic, sells them off and retires to the Bahamas, just as he always jokes about. Either way, I’d like to know how the story ends and further more, I’d like to see Naughty Dog push the PS4 to the limits with a new IP.