PREVIEW – In May, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End has become one of the essential PlayStation 4-exclusives this year, and it showed off what Sony’s – back then, the strongest – console can do. Naughty Dog also presented that they aren’t talentless hacks either. The singleplayer DLC, which was already confirmed to be in development, was revealed at the PlayStation Experience.

A strong start: we saw almost ten minutes of the DLC (or game… more on this subject later) at the beginning of the stream. I already suspected by the first few seconds that it will be related to Uncharted, and I was right. The surprise came a few minutes later: it is going to be a standalone DLC, so you don’t have to own Nathan Drake’s finale to play Lost Legacy‘s new adventures!

Chloe Frazer

Naughty Dog keeps their promise: we are getting a new protagonist, and she will be Chloe Frazer. She first surfaced in Uncharted 2, and the master thief’s goal in the video is to meet her partner, Nadine Ross, who debuted in Uncharted 4 – the female duo can knock a few baddies out easily. As seen in the reveal trailer, the two characters have two different approaches to combat: Chloe is mostly improvising her moves while Nadine uses cold headed tactics to get through her problems.

Their goal is going to be recovering the long lost Tusk of Ganesh. If you think that this name sounds something straight out of India, your guess is correct: we’re heading into India’s Western Ghats mountain range.

Independent

Naughty Dog realized during development that the expansion to Uncharted 4 would be bigger than they originally thought it would be. Lost Legacy is now biggest story expansion to-date, which is now split off from the base game. The devs are so confident in the success of Lost Legacy that it will be available in physical format as well, not just as a digital download.

It wants to keep all the hallmarks of the series, from cinematic storytelling (judging by the trailer which I will embed below, that is not going to be a problem) set within exotic destinations, to dynamic combat and intricate puzzles. What can go possibly wrong with Naughty Dog‘s idea?

Drakeless

Lost Legacy might not be memorable, though. Why? Well, this Uncharted game will be the first without Nathan Drake as the protagonist; all four (or if I count the Vita title too, five) games had him as the lead character. Drake has fused together with the franchise, period. Imagine if there was a new Crash Bandicoot game, and Crash would not be the lead character, making him barely, if not at all, appear in it! It sounds stupid, doesn’t it? This change is what I’m somewhat afraid of.

Lost Legacy can keep the essence of Uncharted that made the series oh-so-loved by the community, but, and this is my opinion, it might be Naughty Dog’s test. If a lot of people purchase Uncharted: Lost Legacy, then they will begin development of something new and Uncharted-related, and if not, they will focus on The Last of Us II, also announced at the PlayStation Experience.

Size matters

After December 13, if you don’t own Uncharted 4‘s Digital Deluxe Edition or the Explorer’s Pack, you will have to pay an unannounced sum of money to acquire Lost Legacy sometime in 2017. (If I had to guess, they would probably launch it in May seeing how the base game came out in the same month in 2016…) That’s fine: early buyers will get the new story for free…

…but there’s another factor that might decide if this game will be a success or not: how much will it be technologically fine? After Uncharted 4, we can expect Lost Legacy to run on 1080p at 30fps WITHOUT frame drops. The PlayStation 4 Pro is another story, though: will the devs pull off a clean 1080p/60 / 4k/30 without any frame rate issues? It’s going to be a large disappointment if the Sony-tied developer can’t get it on the table, and Microsoft will likely use their failure for some negative PR.

The size matters, so let’s just see and wait what Naughty Dog has for us in store. If Lost Legacy can even get close to the quality of A Thief’s End, then we can sit back and relax. Let us be the testers for the future of the franchise…

-V-

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Naughty Dog

Genre:  Action

Publication: TBA