PlayStation’s trophy child Naughty Dog is currently working on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, the studio’s first new IP since The Last of Us in 2013. While the upcoming PS5 exclusive continues development, there have been talks of a remake of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, but original designer Benson Russell believes such a project would be a waste.
Naughty Dog is quite prone to a remake/remaster. The studio has fully remade the original The Last of Us after already remastering it; the original Uncharted has already been remastered alongside the rest of the original trilogy. But with a rabid fanbase desperate for more Nathan Drake, is a remaster worth it?
Russell explained that, unlike some games deserving of a remake, Uncharted has never left the gaming zeitgeist. “System Shock…a remake of that now makes a lot of sense because not just can you play it, but it had horrible key bindings, it kept a lot of people out of it from wanting to play it,” he explained on an upcoming episode of our podcast.
The Uncharted and The Last of Us designer explained that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, despite its age, is still relatively “new” which could be due to the fact that modern games still look to its formula today. “Uncharted as a thing is still in the zeitgeist,” he continued. “There’s already a version you can play on modern consoles [to] get the experience. What’s the point of remastering [or remaking] it?”
The one reason to remake Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune would, largely, be to make it more like a modern Naughty Dog experience with slower, more personal character moments instead of the light pulp of the original game. “I just don’t see the point of remaking [it],” Russell added. “You’d have to rewrite the whole story to make it better which means you’re going to change the spirit and you’re going to change the scenes and what the first one was about, right?”
“You’re going to have to add all these scenes or take things away and a lot of the key set pieces—are you going to keep those? Are you going to have to redo them because they don’t fit your story?” Russell envisions that key set pieces, such as the infamous Jet Ski section, would be heavily altered with Russell envisioning it to be more like a “motorcycle chase” on the water.
The Uncharted designer explains that, as Uncharted is still in the zeitgeist, it’s unlikely to bring in a “new audience”. Instead, the designer suggests they should “take the lessons of Uncharted 4 and make a new game that’s in the past or wherever you need it to be”, giving fans something new with Nathan Drake even if the last game wrapped up his story chronologically. “It doesn’t make any sense [to remake it],” the designer continued. “I honestly thought the same thing about The Last of Us Part 1… these are old games for a reason.”
Similarly to how fans felt about remaking The Last of Us with Part 1, Russell explains that a new game would feel “more like a cash grab than it would feel like anything necessary at this point”. Instead, as a designer and a fan of the series, the game developer would prefer Naughty Dog to “take the spirit” of the series and “make a new game in an earlier time era and go back to what it was”. He continued: “Just don’t recreate the first game. It’s just, eh.”
With that said, Russell is excited to see how Naughty Dog’s next game, Intergalactic, pans out. The upcoming game is a bold new adventure for the studio, seemingly focusing on hack-and-slash combat which the studio has never done before.
Whether or not a remake of the original Uncharted will ever come is currently unknown, although right now it does seem unlikely. While some rumours persist, recent claims state that the remake was scrapped in favour of The Last of Us Part 1. However, considering PlayStation’s egregious remake push this generation and the fact that it has brought in third parties to remake titles—such as Until Dawn—a return to Drake’s Fortune is not outside the realm of possibility.
