From emotional peaks and pits, to high-speed action scenes, to literal peaks and pits, Uncharted 4 has a lot of stuff in it. But a massive game like that doesn't make it out of production without casting off an equally substantial pile of concepts; maybe they mess up the pacing, maybe they don't fit tonally, or maybe there just isn't time to do them right. Uncharted 4 creative director Neil Druckmann ran down some of these notable cuts for Rolling Stone.
And fair warning, there are some spoilers here:
- Uncharted 4 used to have a cooking sequence! You could mix in different ingredients, and even make the dish too spicy - complete with appropriate reactions from the characters.
- You could make snowballs and throw them at Sam in Scotland and he would return fire, but apparently it felt too out of place. Boo.
- You could play fetch with the dog in the epilogue, but "the animation looked kind of janky".
- There was a whole scene in the map room where the crane would collapse with you inside the cabin, sending you flipping and sliding around, but there wasn't time to finish it.
- And this is the only one that Druckmann would consider putting back in for a theoretical director's cut: at one point the two kids you're playing with in the manor would pick up swords and pretend to duel. Naughty Dog planned to do a callback and use the same mechanic in the boss fight at the end of the game, but it ended up cutting the whole thing for time.
Those are the unseen costs of getting a game as massive and polished as Uncharted 4 out the door - some nifty bits are bound to get sanded off. But don't worry too much about Naughty Dog compromising its vision: elsewhere in the interview Druckmann talked about kicking an Uncharted 4 focus tester out for complaining about its prominent women characters.
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