Ex-Uncharted lead Amy Hennig left developer Naughty Dog suddenly in 2014, and all her years of work on Uncharted 4 got dumped like a high school boyfriend. But eight years of hardcore digging by Naughty Dog fan Michael Kemp – Thekempy on YouTube – reveals Hennig's vision for the game was not fully lost, but buried deep. So, a decade after Uncharted 4: A Thief's End finally released, dataminer Kemp is, for the first time, showing fans what they could have had in a new video.
Across an hour-and-a-half, Kemp shares rare, behind-the-scenes and in-game footage of Hennig's Uncharted 4, fashioning a portrait of an action game that put more emphasis on stealth and love interest Elena Fisher than, ultimately, co-directors Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley's shipped version of the game. Watch Kemp's detailed video in full below.
It highlights the different characters, different actors, and ambitious set pieces Hennig had imagined focusing on for Uncharted 4, the last entry in the series she helped create in 2007. Shortly after the game begins, protagonist Nathan Drake and his wife Elena swim deep into the ocean and discover the legendary pirate Henry Avery's shipwreck, leading to a 1695 flashback where you control the swashbuckler yourself and engage in some fancy sword fighting. Nate's fellow adventurer Cutter, a fan-favorite character introduced in Uncharted 3 and only mentioned in the final Uncharted 4, later returns and helps Nate and Elena recover Henry Avery's missing treasure.
From there, there's a lot of island adventure – at one point, Nate gets stranded on a little lump of sand and needs to spear fish and crack coconuts to survive. Much of the game appears similarly pacifist and whimsical, with Nate doing a lot of sneaking around and blending into the crowd with things like a ballroom dancing mini-game. Guns are de-emphasized, presumably because of old fan criticism that Uncharted games don't allow for enough adventuring.
So, Hennig's Uncharted 4 makes a point to be unique in the franchise. Druckmann and Straley ended up putting their own inventiveness into Uncharted 4, which also focuses on Nate recovering Henry Avery's pirate treasure, with the option to play stealthily. But it somewhat tones down the mini-game hijinks.
It's just… different. Kemp explains that, while searching for cut content in Uncharted 4 to make videos in 2018, he "began finding pieces of Uncharted 4 that didn't seem to be related to anything I recognized. References to levels that didn't exist, things in the story that didn't happen." He's spent the last few years assembling these scraps to form what he calls "the most definitive breakdown of the game that Amy Hennig and her team were working on between the years of 2011 to 2014."
It's important that he did. Some fans spent years nursing their desperation to learn what Hennig wanted Uncharted 4 to really be, and recent comments from a former Naughty Dog developer suggested executives thought it was awful, fueling further fan confusion and indignation.
One YouTube commenter on Kemp's video suggests everyone can be at peace now, writing, "This was my closure for Amy Hennigs Uncharted 4."
10 years later, Uncharted 4 remains the perfect antidote to overly bleak and serious adventuring.
