PS4’s ‘Uncharted 4’ Originally Had No Nadine Or Flashback Scenes

Before director and script writer Amy Hennig left Naughty Dog, she was working on Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, the conclusion to the series she created.

Once she left the Sony-owned studio, The Last of Us directing team of Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley took over the reigns of the game, and while it didn’t change a lot, it certainly wasn’t the same game Hennig imagined.

Speaking to USGamer during the recent DICE Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada, Hennig revealed that while the core of the game was maintained after the aforementioned duo took over, there were some big changes to its story and how it’s presented, as well as to some of the characters. For example, in Hennig’s version of the game there were no flashback scenes and Nadine, who was ultimately the game’s secondary antagonist, didn’t even exist.

“Well, look, this whole spine of the thing in terms of what is the core historical mystery and the idea of this Henry Avery and this lost treasure, because we would try to start from what is that historical hook that we can then put a “what if” to,” said Hennig speaking of Uncharted 4. “And there was lots of rumors around. I mean, there’s a lot of romanticized rumors around that age of piracy, about where this money could have disappeared to and this idea of a pirate utopia which of course was probably just a fabrication or something that was certainly an exaggeration over some sandbar off of Madagascar or something. But we just thought well why not crank that to 11, right?”

Hennig continued:

“And just like in Uncharted 1, it was meant to be a little bit of a return to form. This idea that a lot of the story would be taking place on this undiscovered or forgotten pirate utopia island and that the detective story that we could weave through that. So all the beats, if you look at the chapter beats—with the exception of we didn’t have the flashbacks to his childhood and then we didn’t have the Nadine character—but just looking at the break by break that sorted the chapters, like where they go, what was happening, that was all while I was there….

“So I mean, like I said the DNA, the DNA and the core story were all there. The major differences had to do with like, I was introducing the idea of Sam as the brother. But my take on it was sort of different, that it was a little bit more—I mean I wouldn’t call him the antagonist in the classic sense, but it was an antagonistic force in Drake’s life that he then had to reconcile. So it was, you know, complicated by stuff coming up from the past. So, it’s a little bit different than him showing up and you know, “Hey bro, I got a problem.” Then, of course there was an antagonistic element to Sam in the final version of U4, but it wasn’t right there from the outset. So we kind of, in my story, it was a little bit more of the journey from this ghost from Drake’s past being an antagonist to sort of reconciliation and reunification.”

As you can see, while Hennig’s Uncharted 4 didn’t change much structurally when it transitioned to Druckmann and Straley, the details and dressing around the edges changed considerably. I mean, if you strip out Nadine from the game I don’t think much changes at all, which mostly comes down to her being an ultimately irrelevant character. But not having the flashback scenes and tweaking Sam and Nathan’s relationship to be more antagonistic from the jump, sounds like a very different game tonally. Sadly, we’ll never know whether Hennig’s vision of the game was better than what was released in 2016.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is available exclusively on PS4.