Uncharted's Drake Doesn't Actually Take Bullet Damage

An interesting trivia fact has been revealed about the Uncharted series that says its protagonist Nathan Drake never actually takes bullet damage, despite what the UI might suggest.

When playing the Uncharted series, red indicators show where the "damage" is coming from, a staple mechanic in most games that involve shooting. In Naughty Dog's PlayStation series, however, the markers still show where the fire is coming from but indicate that Drake's "luck" is running out, according to Naughty Dog animator Jonathan Cooper. The animator explained how the feature works on Twitter and said that whenever Drake's luck eventually runs out after receiving too much incoming fire, enemies will get a clear shot on him and kill him.

That’s a mega-swing! Sidenote I learned on joining the team: Drake doesn’t ever take bullet damage. The red UI that shows ‘hits’ is to represent his ‘luck’ running out. Eventually enemies will get a clear shot and kill him if he takes enough near-misses. https://t.co/byzVKYXVe7

— Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) July 8, 2018

Uncharted's creative director and writer Amy Hennig vouched for Cooper's tweet and said that the luck and bullet damage mechanic was implemented to match the game's spirit.

"True! That was the original intention (to stay more aligned with the spirit and tone of the films we were homaging)," Hennig said on Twitter.

Cooper then dropped some video game terminology on everyone by referring to the mechanic as a form of "ludonarrative dissonance," a phrase that not everyone might be familiar with. Ludonarrative dissonance is defined as a conflict between a video game's narrative and gameplay, a term that's been used when talking about Uncharted before. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End even has a trophy with the same name that players get for killing 1,000 enemies, a reference to the fact that Drake's character doesn't seem at all like a cold-blooded killer.

The way that the mechanic's explained might surprise many people who have played through the Uncharted games, but it does help clear up those questions about how games' protagonists can withstand inhuman amounts of bullet damage before eventually being taken out in a screen that's turned totally red. It also brings about questions for other game developers and whether they had similar intentions with the auto-regenerating health, but for those games where you have to manually heal yourself, it seems that you're still just able to survive waves of bullets and patch yourself up with a medkit.