Spurred on by a certain character showing up for a major cameo inAstro Bot,Unchartedfans are beggingSonyto bring the series back for another outing. As Johnny Flores Jr.noted in a news article on this phenomenon, it’s been eight years sinceUncharted 4: A Thief’s End(seven since the underrated spin-off,Uncharted: The Lost Legacy) and, after the better part of a decade, fans are tired of waiting.
The Long Wait For The Return Of Uncharted
I get it. There’s no other series I’ve played as consistently as Uncharted. I got the first game alongside my PS3 as a Christmas present in 2007, and got Uncharted 4 alongside my PS4 as a Christmas present nine years later. I will always pick up and play an Uncharted game within a year of its release, come rain or shine. There are other series that I love more (The Last of Us, Zelda), but there aren’t any that I’ve loved as reliably.
Like many series fans, the only Uncharted game I haven’t played is Golden Abyss. If theVitaprequel got a PS5 port tomorrow, I would beat it before the weekend was over.
It’s difficult to imagine another studio taking the series over and fully delivering on what made the games special, and its unlikelyNaughty Dogwill go back to the well again at this point. There are plenty of examples of new developers succeeding with an established series. You don’t even have to look any further than Naughty Dog, whoseCrashtrilogy was followed up by the similarly excellent, Toys For Bob-developedCrash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time. But that example also points to the dangers of attempting to replicate a studio’s success. There were 21 years between Crash Team Racing (the final ND-developed Crash game) and Crash 4, with 14 games (give or take) that fans don’t care about in between.
Uncharted is even more difficult to follow-up on because the things that define the series are so varied. Crash is a 3D platformer, and that’s basically it. If a studio has proven it can make a good 3D platformer, there’s a good chance it could make a good Crash game. But Uncharted is so much more — and forgive me for using a word that may take you back to high school chemistry — heterogeneous. It’s a third-person shooterwithpuzzlesandplatformingandreally well-written storiesandbelievable charactersandbest-in-class graphics. Crash 4 was good because the running and jumping felt good. Uncharted 5 would need to deliver on so much more.
Can Any Studio Besides Naughty Dog Do Everything Uncharted Needs?
There are studios that do aspects of the Uncharted formula well. The Capcom teams behind theResident Evil 2 and 4 remakesdo great work with graphics and third-person shooting, but have a completely different approach to character (and it’s difficult to imagine the situation that would lead to a Capcom team developing a Sony first-person game). MachineGames has fantastic characters and exciting narratives, but the tone is fairly different, its games are first-person (not third-person) shooters, and most importantly, it’s owned by Xbox.
So, which Sony-owned studio could handle Uncharted? Within Sony, no other studio has the full package. Sucker Punch nailed the platforming-with-a-vista inGhost of Tsushima, but that game isn’t up to Naughty Dog standards narratively or graphically and has no puzzle component. Guerrilla might be the closest from a gameplay and graphics perspective, butHorizonhasn’t produced many memorable characters.Insomniacis a jack-of-all-trades, and has made games in a wide variety of genres, but its stories just aren’t on the same level. More importantly, all three studios have their own major IP to work on and probably aren’t interested in taking over another developer’s franchise.
Bend Studiomight be the most likely successor, given that it’s the only studio besides Naughty Dog to have made an Uncharted game (the aforementioned Golden Abyss), and it was reportedly co-developing an Uncharted game with Naughty Dog at one point post-Days Gone. But that game was reportedly canceled, so it seems unlikely that a Naughty Dog/Bend partnership will bear Nathan Drake-shaped fruit anytime soon.
So, will we ever get another Uncharted? If the 21st century media landscape has taught me anything, it’s that no valuable property is ever truly dead. Look no further than the movie that topped the box office for the past two weekends, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, for confirmation. But that raises another question: will we be waiting 36 years for the next Uncharted?
