Uncharted 4 director says this E3 will be Nathan Drake's last

Nathan Drake's been scaling walls, killing mercenaries, and running for his life since 2007, but it will all be over soon. Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann has teased that after Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Drake will hang up his trademark shoulder holster and half-tucked Henley for good, assuming they're not shot full of holes or dashed to pieces.

Embedding a picture of the Los Angeles Convention Center set for E3 2015 with a huge poster of the older and grimace-ier Drake hung front and center, Druckmann said on Twitter that Drake's "looking mighty good for his last E3."

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Of course, he did put that little grinning devil face at the end of the tweet. Is Druckmann smirking over his knowledge of Drake's ultimate fate, or subtly hinting that Uncharted will abandon traditional marketing in favor of elaborate sidewalk chalk ad campaigns? Or is he just mocking us for believing that Sony would ever stop making Uncharted games?

Naughty Dog has teased that Uncharted 4 will be Drake's last big score ever since it was announced - the subtitle is "A Thief's End," after all. Still, it's tough to believe that any hugely successful franchise will stay down for long in this hit-driven video game market, no matter how much sense it makes for the story.

We'll find out if this truly is one last time for "one last time" when Uncharted 4 releases in early spring 2016 or, more accurately, at the next few E3s after that.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.