Ever since its delay earlier in the year, things have been a little quiet on the Uncharted 4: A Thief's End front. We're expecting a big blowout at E3 next month, of course, but the past few months have seen Naughty Dog getting its head down and quietly slaving away on its first fully PlayStation 4 exclusive game.
However, an interview with GamesTM magazine has kicked up a few new details on the hotly anticipated escapade. Particularly, writer Josh Scherr and designer Ricky Cambier have talked a little bit about what Sony's super machine is enabling the studio to achieve. Basically, you should probably prepare to have your minds blown.
"We're still trying to figure out exactly what we can do with [the PS4]," Cambier told the publication. "From a design perspective, it's given us the opportunity to push the scale of the environment so that you've got choices in the combat setups that are incredibly vast. So we can put that in when we want to."
Of course, we saw glimpses of this during the title's PlayStation Experience demo: the jungle-like setting that protagonist Nathan Drake was tasked with conquering was packed with different routes, channels, and hiding places – and it's up to you to decide how you'll use those to come out on top. The stop-and-pop action of yore is already looking old.
But the developer believes that the PS4 will also enable it to tell a more impactful story. "[The new tech] lets us emote more, with all of the 'bones' that we can put onto [character's faces] – you pan round the camera to look at Nate's face when he's climbing and you see him grimacing and all of this kind of stuff," Cambier added.
In fact, the developer states that where The Last of Us' leads had some 90 to 100 'bones' in their faces, the cast of Uncharted 4 will have three to five times more. "This lets us get much, much more detail and fidelity in there, so that you can really empathise with what [the characters] are saying, and it allows us to hit certain poses that we couldn't quite hit before," Scherr concluded.
Better animation, bigger environments, greater fidelity – where Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception perhaps struggled to push the property forward, Naughty Dog is making all of the right noises regarding the series' fourth instalment. Where do you think that the Californian company needs to focus its efforts, though? Leave a quip in the comments section below.
