Amy Hennig also had her own vision for Uncharted 4, but that version never came to fruition after she left the studio.

Developer Gabriel Betancourt recently appeared on Kiwi Talks, and thanks to that interview, we learned a little more about a darker chapter in Naughty Dog‘s history. While he does not directly name either the people involved or the project itself, Betancourt’s description lines up with previously reported timelines and accounts. According to him, the project had already been in development for around three years when company leadership, presumably Sony, stepped in and began questioning it, despite the fact that the studio’s previous three projects had all been successful. In his telling, the project lead had been surrounded by people who kept saying yes to everything, and by the time the team reached its fourth project, they had become too comfortable basking in the glow of those earlier wins.

Betancourt says the studio then asked a director from another internal team to give an opinion on the project. During the meeting, that director allegedly told the team outright that he thought the game was terrible. His reasoning, according to Betancourt, was that the game lacked clear objectives, that it was difficult to follow what was happening, and that the controls felt clumsy. He also reportedly said that what the team was building simply did not live up to the standard the studio had established with its past work.

After management reviewed the project, the team was threatened with losing its funding unless those problems were fixed. In the end, the current director of Uncharted 4 at the time was removed. That director was Amy Hennig, and according to the developer in the interview, she was replaced by the director who had attended that meeting, along with two other people who stepped in to salvage the game.

The other team was almost certainly The Last of Us team, which makes Neil Druckmann the obvious candidate. He went on to become one of the directors of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End alongside Bruce Straley. The identity of the third person remains unclear, but one thing that appears certain is that Druckmann and Straley threw out roughly eight months of Hennig’s story work.

Source: Reddit