Uncharted 4 - The Ultimate Critique - Luke Stephens

uncharted 4 for many it's their favorite game in the entire franchise for others they feel it represents the over commercialization of it it's dumbed down it lost a lot of its soul from the prior titles and in this video we're going to go through the entire game start to finish breaking down everything it does well everything it does poorly and try to decide what it actually is is it great is it lackluster is it just another entry in the series or is this something truly truly special i feel like i should let my position be known i played uncharted 4 first so this has a special place in my heart i will fully acknowledge that i've rose tinted glasses when it comes to this game this was the very first game i played on my very first playstation 4 slim that i ever bought right out of high school i was so excited for it and so it holds a special place in my heart but it's been years since i went through the game again and so today we're gonna go through the game and analyze it critically i've played through it again on stream and then again off stream just for this video so i could analyze it as critically as i possibly could breaking it down bit by bit so hopefully you'll enjoy the ride just as much as i have links in the description box below for all of my social media so if you want to follow me join our discord to enter to win a bunch of free games like an upcoming giveaway i'm doing for eldon ring i'm giving away a couple copies of that on steam all you have to do to enter is join our discord and follow my other social media it's easy peasy go for it but that said enough dilly dallying let's get right into it uncharted 4 ladies and gentlemen enjoy and a real quick thank you to the sponsor of this video without whom it wouldn't be possible skillshare skillshare is the online learning community for every kind of learner whether you're looking to learn how to draw paint or improve your video editing skillshare has a ton of classes taught by industry professionals to help you achieve those goals i for one have wanted to learn how to use adobe after effects in these videos for years so after procrastinating for said years i decided it was high time to start learning how to use the software so i hopped on skillshare and i found this class in animating with ease by jake bartlett and hopefully you've noticed the improvements in my editing over the last couple of months but it's not just after effects they have classes on almost anything you can think of and the first 1000 people who click on the link in the description box below will get a free one month trial to try out classes on whatever they're passionate about check them out today and of course a huge thank you to all of these patrons for making this video and all of the other critiques we make on this channel possible and an extra special thank you to inar and abdullah for making extremely generous contributions the game opens with nathan drake driving a boat through a storm there's somebody else on the boat with him but at this point we don't know much if you have subtitles enabled you'll see that this character is named sam but once again that doesn't mean much to us as you drive over the large waves you'll realize that you're being chased by a bunch of what can only be assumed are bad guys who are taking shots at you firing explosives and trying to ram you after a moment an explosion goes off knocking nathan into the water this also damaged the boat so once you get back on deck you have to take up a defensive position to hold off the enemy attackers while this mystery man repairs the engine this serves as a very basic combat tutorial to introduce you to the gun play and also the cover system already we can feel that the gunplay is far more responsive than it was in uncharted 3. there's been major improvements to the feel of the guns the look and even the sound one other element that i noticed that i actually bizarrely really enjoy is this little crosshair option that you have enabled by default basically when you're firing a small outline shows where the bullets are likely to land but once you actually fire the gun you'll see a small circle show up outlining where the bullet actually traveled it's very simple it just shows where the bullet trajectory was calculated is going and explains why you might miss some shots even if it seems or feels as though you should have landed them of course this isn't going to excuse or forgive the numerous shooting galleries that we'll have over the course of the game's campaign but it does help the combat system feel a little bit more fair and at the very least more transparent to the player explaining why certain things are happening in the way they are with something as simple as a circle on a screen nonetheless i simply enjoy this i think it feels really satisfying and i like seeing where the bullets go within my crosshairs but moving on eventually the engine is fixed by this mystery man you hop back into the cockpit so to say and start to travel towards the big island in the distance which seemingly is your one escape from all of these enemies coming after you naughty dog did a really good job of instilling fear in the player during the sequence because you actually do feel panicked as you drive towards the island when in reality there isn't actually a threat here these big scary rocks you can try to run into them but the ship will automatically steer out of the way if you even approach them speed is also controlled and the enemy boats movements are controlled as well in reality there's very little threat here at all you're on train tracks but the sleight of hand that naughty dog has perfected at this point comes out in full force the player feels panicked even though there isn't a threat because they did such a good job of building the atmosphere and contextualizing everything so that you feel truly panicked in everything that you're doing and rest assured this is not the only time we're going to see the sleight of hand employed in this game naughty dog is a team full of experts when it comes to this magic of game design and we'll see a lot of it here eventually you'll get close enough to the island that a large ship will spawn right next to you ramming into the boat that you're driving the boat capsizes launching nate and sam into the water and the screen goes black we then cut to a flashback this is nate as a child within a catholic orphanage we immediately see that he has a black eye and seems distraught as a nun lectures him about his actions the nun communicates that she's tired of giving him all of these lectures and that he will no longer be allowed to go on a school retreat nate says that he doesn't actually care about that which the nun insists is actually the problem it appears nate started a fight because someone wouldn't give back his book the two boys bickered back and forth for a while before eventually a fight broke out which is how he got the black eye but nate does say that that wasn't all that there was there was more to this confrontation but he refuses to elaborate we will later find out what actually went down that caused this fight to break out and it reveals a lot about nate's character but for now he leaves it obscure frustrated at nate's inability to admit fault or explain clearly what's going on the nun declares that no matter what she tries nate just seems to be determined to end up like his brother which is by inference not a good thing now up to this point in the series we haven't actually seen anything about nathan drake having a brother in fact most of the things that we've seen up to this point would suggest that he was an only child or at the very least an orphan who was left on his own we saw this in uncharted 3 with all the background information we got when we met sully and that was at a time when nate looked only a little bit older than this version of him in uncharted 4. for anybody paying attention this will get the gears turning wondering what happened to nate's brother is nate's brother dead did something happen did he get himself in such trouble that he's been locked away in prison and now nate's left here all alone who knows well we're about to know because immediately upon the nuns exiting of the room there's a light that flashes through the window which seems to nate to immediately communicate that sam his brother is outside summoning him in effect so nate climbs out the window and we get introduced to the free climbing system that in my opinion is probably the best part of uncharted 4 not necessarily because the system is incredibly robust and features amazing animations and flair that makes the free running system in a game like assassin's creed unity feel like it was simply a roblox mod but rather because when paired with the other things that naughty dog does so well namely the set pieces and the incredible vistas and graphic showcases it really stands out from the herd after all you can have an incredible free running system but if the world you're exploring by way of that free running system is bland or uninteresting and flatly boring to look at there's no real point it's a wasted feature after all a tool is only as good as the thing that you're using it on and in the case of uncharted 4 we have incredible vistas moments of unbelievable beauty and clarity and all of it is fantastically showcased by way of this very free climbing system but for now it starts off easy enough you basically climb out the window go across a ledge climb around jump around it's pretty basic you do have to push through another section of the school or orphanage it's technically both it's technically a boy's home which is a school and an orphanage kind of mixed into one but for now i'll just call it a school and after you go through the window and into the main hallway you see the father father ryan duffy speaking with the same nun that just chastised you the nun is asking the priest to get rid of nate and the priest promises to talk to him in the morning and to not give up on him quite yet and after the father leaves and the nun goes into the adjacent room you can actually find the behavioral report form where the events that we previously discussed that led to nathan's black eye are discussed in detail and it's here that we see all of the nitty-gritty of what exactly happened though once again the real reason why everything went down and why nathan freaked out remains a mystery but we put the paper down and move into the next room which is our only way towards sam because we need to get back out the windows and onto the rooftops and here in one of the more subtle story beats we can actually see the nun that was just chastising nathan for breaking the rules being out of control and reckless she's smoking out the window it's really subtle but it just goes to show that nobody's perfect even this nun that thinks she's so perfect and beyond nathan and his behavior she's breaking the rules too but setting that aside we climb out the window and we see sam really close ushering us towards him we have some more free climbing and eventually we meet up with sam and get to have our first conversation with him it's established that he's the older brother he's no longer in school here and seems to be out on his own doing something we can also see that he really cares about his little brother even if he's not able to provide or care for him in the way that would probably be best for a boy his age the two share some light banter as you climb across the rooftops towards a large clock tower it's not clear where you're going but sam makes it clear that he has something he needs to show nathan so you push on once again this is in effect just a very large free running tutorial yes it's contextualized within the story but the reason that they're introducing the rope and grappling mechanic as well as large jumps across ravines that you have to grab onto small ledges for all of this is purely to introduce the player to these systems so that they offend better for themselves once you're doing this in the main game eventually you reach the outskirts of the campus use the grapple hook to grab onto a lamp post and swing all the way across to what seems to be an apartment building on the other side of the wall and the street surrounding it upon crossing and landing at the street below sam shows off what he's been waiting to share with nate it's a motorcycle interestingly nate immediately assumes that this motorcycle or motorbike i guess is a more appropriate term is stolen it says a lot about their relationship and also what nathan thinks of his bigger brother sam sam insists that he's a changed man but nae doesn't seem too convinced he also becomes sad almost immediately saying that sam only tries to pull these types of stunts when he's trying to make up for something sam says that nate is obviously too smart for his own good because sam is trying to make up for something he says that he's got a well-paying job but it means that he has to leave for an entire year nate who has nobody left feels very hurt obviously because he feels as though his older brother is bailing on him but sam thinks of it much more as though he's going off to earn money so that they can go off and do their own thing be their own people nate also insists that this school isn't the best place for him and that he'd be better off following his big brother wherever he may be going but sam isn't convinced he thinks that this school provides the structure that nate needs to excel which is probably true to be perfectly fair but it's also at this point that nate lets loose what actually happened that caused the fight to break out which left him with a black eye you see we don't know many details but what we do know is that nathan drake's mother and sam's mother in turn had some sort of serious illness when the kids were very little like around the age of five and it was so serious an illness that she was effectively terminal and it eventually led to her committing suicide to escape the pain and suffering which was inevitable as a result of this illness and when nate and this strange boy got in of tussle over this book the young boy brought up what is typically considered to be the canonical catholic teaching as it pertains to suicides which is that they cannot go to heaven because they have corrupted their own soul in their final act so because this little kid had told nate that his mother was in hell because of what she did to escape this horrific pain he freaked out and decided to start a fight which led to him getting beat up and we can only assume what the other guy looks like but for all we know it was a fight that went back and forth and resulted in both kids getting pretty injured and this is another example of the major shift that's taken place since uncharted 3. in that game everything was spoon fed to you all of the plot points were extremely clearly and expressly communicated so much so that they overly communicated a lot of things to the point where there were major plot holes all over the game because they set up so many premises that they could never follow up on whereas this time around they're taking active steps to avoid telling the player every single detail and they're being much more subtle when it comes to communicating the story at hand it's one of the great things that neil druckmann is so good at he's phenomenal when it comes to writing the narrative and leaving things out that aren't necessary and speaking of we should make it clear the major shift that happened within naughty dog right as uncharted 4 was starting to ramp up in terms of development namely uncharted 1 2 and 3 had all been headed up by amy hennig who is a very talented developer but she's a developer that has preferred much more of the kitschy style she likes the knee slapping good time that action movies tend to provide and much less the dark gritty serious stories that at this point naughty dog is known for in uncharted 3 you can start to feel the tension that was at play within the studio as it was being put together there's a conflict where some of the studio heads seem to want a darker and more grounded story much more akin to the last of us which would launch soon after uncharted 3 and others were just fine with the typical kitschy game that they had been developing throughout the previous uncharted titles but the result for uncharted 3 was a game that felt very conflicted as to what it wanted to be uncharted 4 had begun its development at the hands of amy hennig and the same team that did uncharted 3 but after the overwhelming success of the last of us a decision was made to make this game much more grounded gritty and even realistic it's not to say that you couldn't have crazy and wild set pieces and bombastic action sequences but it is to say that you couldn't go and have nazi zombies or supernatural things all over the place you needed to make an active effort to explain the events of the world in a grounded way and the characters needed to be realistic sympathetic and the dialogue needed to be of a much higher quality than we had seen in previous titles furthermore the characters needed to have actual arcs between each other and independently nathan needed to have an arc over the course of the game he needed to start in one place and end up in another same with the other subplot characters and they needed to have arcs between each other nate and elena needed to have an ark sam and they needed an ark even sully and sam needed to have some sort of arc all of these things needed to work together and to be perfectly honest it seemed as though that was outside of amy's wheelhouse after uncharted 4 had been in development for a couple of years the team was not anywhere near where they needed to be and amy was called up to speak with executives at naughty dog to discuss the game's direction and where they were headed we don't know what exactly went on inside that meeting room but what we do know is that amy hennig decided to leave and give up on uncharted 4 effectively leaving it in the hands of bruce strahle and neil druckmann who had just come off of the success of the last of us funnily enough neil druckmann and bruce straley didn't actually want to work on uncharted 4 they had spent so much time working on the last of us a game which they were not certain was going to turn out even half decent much less the masterpiece that it became they just wanted to go away and take a break but they were needed with uncharted 4 so they said that they would help temporarily to get it back in a good direction and state they would go take their vacations and come back and potentially help clean up the game towards the end of development but what inevitably happened was they took over development of uncharted 4 developed some ideas and then followed it through to the very end and this is why uncharted 4 feels so incredibly different from uncharted 3. for better or worse it's different some people love the changes that were made some people hate the changes that were made and miss the kitschy lighthearted stories that were told in the previous games for me uncharted 4 was my first exposure to the franchise so of course i'm a little bit biased when it comes to evaluating all of the games together but what i do know is that these games rely a lot on the banter that goes on between characters as they explore levels together or move through the world there have always been cutscenes and plots that interweave with each other even in the previous games but the quality of the writing was never anything to write home about uncharted 4 marked the first time that the game felt as though we were dealing with a story that was worth telling for its own sake it could be converted to a novel or a film and it would stand on its own in other words it didn't feel as though it had to be a video game to work uncharted 1 2 and 3 all wouldn't work in other mediums they needed to be video games to work as a story or any sort of entertainment and all of this isn't meant to be a dig at amy hennig she's a fantastically talented developer and has done some incredible work over the years but i think it is fair to say that this franchise in effect outgrew her her type of game design is very specific very unique as is neil druckmann and bruce straley's the types of games that amy puts together neil druckmann and bruce could only dream of putting together and vice versa amy's great at the classic action-adventure titles whereas bruce and neil especially tried to tell much more grounded gritty and mature stories again it's okay if you prefer one of these styles over the other but the reason i'm bringing it up is so that you can understand why these games feel so disparate and as we continue going through uncharted 4 you're going to notice that the game will continue separating itself from uncharted 3 and it's only going to grow more severe but to get back to the story sam says that he wasn't just trying to surprise nate with a motorcycle that he got for himself rather he has something much more interesting to share and that is that he's figured out where all of the documents that their mother wrote and put together have been stored they were bought by some old lady who's a collector of some sort and they're being stored in a huge mansion nearby so they both get on the motorbike and head that way we then get a slow transition to an early 20s nate that's fighting in a prison yard funnily enough this is a panamanian jail which is what nate referenced in the very opening of uncharted 1 way back in the day uh pirates pirates yeah the modern kind they don't take prisoners at least not male prisoners wait what are you talking about uh shouldn't we call the authorities or something yeah that'd be a great idea but we don't exactly have a permit to be here what yeah so unless you want to end up in a panamanian jail we should probably handle this ourselves what's worse you obviously haven't been in a panamanian jail do you know how to use one of these so a fist fight ensues and this serves as the tutorial for a close combat encounter it's pretty straightforward basically punching and strafing it's nothing to write home about there's also sort of a parry button slash breakout button in the form of triangle but it's not anything robust after fighting for a few moments nate is handcuffed and led away into an isolation room or you might call it the whole allah shawshank redemption nate seems completely unworried and at this point we don't know why he's in prison so far we haven't had a single event seemingly take place in the present we seem to have a flash forward at the very beginning of the game then we had a major flash back to when nate was a child and now we have a flash more forward but still back to nate in his early 20s in a panamanian jail this is one of my frustrations with uncharted 4 it takes so long for the game to finish setting everything up it just feels as though they could have done this in a more efficient way i understand that the writers had to do a lot they had to introduce sam as a character an older brother that spawned with his younger brother they had to introduce rafe the villain of the game they had to introduce the plotline of the avery treasure they had to set up this whole subplot line of the old lady collector in the mansion that explains why nate and sam had to go on the run in the first place they have all of these things going on all at once and i find it fairly overwhelming but rest assured we're almost through the flashbacks after being left in the hold for some undefined period of time vargas opens the door and leads him through a series of tunnels vargas is the prison warden who's in charge of all of this and it turns out he's really corrupt as well at the end of this series of hallways he leads you into a cell that faces the open air you see this prison seems to have been built on a cliff side part of it is falling apart and the part that's falling apart happens to expose itself towards a very old prison tower this old tower which is partially falling apart apparently holds some sort of clue that they need to find the avery treasure and this is when it clicks together vargas has been paid off by nate rafe and sam to in effect arrest them hold them in the prison as everyday prisoners so that they can get to the prison tower without arousing suspicion find whatever they need and then get out the problem is vargas happens to have opened the letter which contained the map fragment that nate's bringing with him he needs this fragment to find a series of clues which he thinks will lead him to the next clue for the treasure they gave vargas this envelope under the impression that he wasn't to open it and merely hand it over once they got nate to this point but now that vargas has opened the letter he knows what they're actually searching for a 400 million dollar treasure and now he realizes that he holds all the cards because if he doesn't let them out they simply won't find the treasure so he can begin to extort them for a larger cut simply by holding their release over them but that'll come up in a moment for now we get our first free form adventure section of the game this is completely up to the player to explore and navigate you slide climb swing drag and pull all manner of things into place to get into the tower use the scrap that you brought with you to find a hollowed-out rock which contains a broken crucifix this puzzle you use to find the crucifix i was hoping would be a little bit more robust but it's actually remarkably straightforward basically you're going to use the fragment that you brought with you fold it over which is a nice way of showing players how they can manipulate objects that they're holding which will reveal a sagittarius and scorpio sign and the signs correspond with numbers that have been carved into rocks on the walls of the room you have to total the numbers up not separate them and pull out the stone that's marked accordingly in this case with a 12. this isn't really a puzzle it's just following a to b to c to d until you eventually find the object this is something we'll see a lot throughout the course of uncharted 4 that the puzzles aren't really puzzles for the most part there's no active thought required you're simply following along a set path that the developers have put out you're just going through the motions in effect but regardless you climb all the way back to vargas you tell them that you didn't find anything but you do ask for blueprints to the prison in case you miss something it's very important that you make sure that vargas doesn't know you found what you are looking for because if he knows that nate's realized he can hold their release over them vargas says that he has a bunch of old files so he'll look through those for blueprints that could potentially lead to more information about a previously collapsed tower or something that might have actually held the clue that vargas thinks they haven't found yet but for now nate needs to get back into the regular prison population so he's handcuffed and led back into the prison yard we now see adult sam and this is when i think most players will probably put together who they were on that boat with at the beginning of the game i don't know if i'm just like a jerk or something but i really don't think that full grown sam looks very much like his young counterpart i mean i guess i get it with the nose and the eyes they're fairly similar but i can't help but feel as though the smoking has done a number on his skin the point is sam was the one who was on the boat with nate at the very beginning of the game which sets up a sort of underwhelming premise as we'll find out shortly because the big fake out that they're about to pull isn't actually a fake out because they've already shown us the answer that there aren't any stakes it's just a fake out nate reunites with sam and a gentleman called rafe who seems to be the useless member of the group but it turns out he's actually the one funding the whole operation you see sam is the history buff he knows everything about avery all of the history he's studied all of the characters as it pertains to this particular story he's the expert nate is the one who gets his hands dirty climbing swinging doing everything that other people don't want to do because it's not safe for borderline stupid and rafe is the credit card he's the one who has all of the money thanks to a very wealthy family and he is trying to pursue this treasure because he's in effect searching for some sort of meaning in life it's kind of sad and pathetic but his character isn't very drawn out beyond that so that's kind of all we have to go on it's also important to note that there's dialogue here that explains that nate and sam don't like rafe they don't even want him to be here he is just here for his money and i think rafe also has picked up on this he feels like the third wheel because he is but for now the group needs to get together set their differences aside and discuss next steps so they go into a large laundry room to discuss things more privately inside night shows off the crucifix which is soon after revealed to not actually be a crucifix because it shows saint dismiss and not jesus the inscription on the cross reads quote we receive the due rewards of our deeds meaning that the figure is the penitent thief not christ because after all during the crucifixion as described in the bible three people were put on crosses one on either side of jesus who was in the middle one was a thief who mocked jesus openly and the other was a thief that was very sorry and penitent and this particular individual is known as saint dismiss and he's the one reflected on this cross and it's no mistake because we're dealing with pirates in this game so the idea that henry avery would view himself as the penitent thief makes sense immediately upon this realization that this isn't christ on a cross but rather saying dismiss sam begins to laugh explaining that there's actually a cathedral of saint dismiss in scotland and the very last sighting of avery was also in scotland so the team realizes they need to go to scotland so they start to head off to find vargas and hopefully leave the prison but upon doing so they're ambushed by a bunch of people that nate and sam have thoroughly pissed off both in their endeavors to in the case of sam gamble and in the case of nate fist fight a brawl breaks out which allows you to fight a bunch of these guys with the help of your teammates it's fine i don't know i just don't think these fist fighting sequences are particularly fun but before it gets too far vargas breaks in with a bunch of prison guards takes everybody into custody locks him away and takes our married trio up to his office he also finds the cross with saint dismiss on it and realizes that nate had lied to him he had found something in the tower and he was simply trying to cut him out of what he perceived to be his rightful share open his office vargas dismisses the other guards leaving him alone with the three men he demands that he gets an equal cut of the treasure in effect he wants 25 of the 400 million dollar treasure simply because he's going to let them out of the prison and if they refuse he'll just have them killed or keep them in the prison indefinitely rafe negotiating on behalf of the other two agrees to this amount it says that it's only fair but when the two shake on it rafe stabs with a shiv vargas in the side but right before vargas dies he's able to fire off his pistol alerting all of the other guards that something has happened so now the trio has to escape the prison which has just been placed on high alert because the freaking warden has just been stabbed to death it's also established rafe as a bit of a maniac nobody thinks that this was the smart or reasonable plan in fact it's very unlikely that he would be able to enforce his collection of this 25 cut of the treasure after all if he's stuck being a warden of a prison in panama what are the odds that he would actually be able to force the collection of this debt i mean it's not like something like this could be enforced in a court of law that they would go to court and the judge would say ah yes did you make a blood pact with this corrupt warden for a quarter cut of this treasure that is of questionable legality as to your collection of it i i don't think that would hold up in court i think it could only be enforced with a strong arm and even then it's really unlikely that this guy who is pretty um lacking in power and resources it's unlikely he'd be able to do much of anything about it so i'm just not convinced that this made any sense whatsoever and i don't think nate and sam were convinced of it either which is why they respond in such a baffled way towards rafe when he does this it was just reckless for the sake of being reckless but you know what it gives us an excuse to escape a prison under threat of gunfire which is much more exciting so that's what we do you free run and fight your way to the edge of the prison at which point there's one final jump that you have to make before you get to the wall and can escape the prison completely rafe and nate are able to make it across just fine and sam is left behind he makes his leap but just barely misses having nate hold him dearly keeping him up but a barrage of gunfire comes out right as he lands on the ledge sam coughs up blood which point we realize he's been hit at least a few times sam loses consciousness and nate loses his grip and sam falls all the way down past the sheet metal into the darkness left with no other options nate and rafe sprint over the wall through the vegetation and into the water below where there's a boat waiting they've escaped but sam seems to have been left for dead and then the title sequence rolls that has effectively been the introductory section of uncharted 4. so we're finally done with flashbacks and flash forwards now we're in the body of the game so buckle up after the opening credits rolls a 15 years later prompt shows up on a black screen the camera transitions through a school of fish at which point it's revealed to us that nathan drake is swimming at the bottom of a harbor looking for something he's speaking with somebody named jameson as he searches the sea floor for again something we don't know for this being the first moment that we really get to see who nathan drake is after the events of uncharted 3 that is the version of nathan drake that's in the quote-unquote present this is actually a fairly mundane intro sure we're exploring a mysterious underwater location and eventually we come across a damaged shipping container which appears to hold some sort of contents that nate is interested in but the tone and pace is markedly less exciting than the previous scenes this is also reflected in the outright lack of music there's nothing going on here and once you go into the shipping container you see why all nathan is doing is collecting cargo that's ended up at the bottom of this harbor as a result of a train crash apparently he's working with some company that does underwater recovery which makes sense that he would find this job i mean after all he does have the skill set that would lead to somebody being successful in this field he's resourceful fit and likes putting himself in dangerous situations but nonetheless it's not quite the life that you expected nathan drake to be living over the next few minutes you collect some boxes hoist up the shipping container and load everything into the center of the shipping container you then get to ride the crane all the way to the surface which has to be one of the cooler transitions between scenes that i've seen in a long time i know it's just going from underwater to above water but i can't help but feel as though this was done really really well and as you're raised above the harbor surface you can even see repairs being performed on the bridge that the shipping container went off it's a good touch and i know it's probably stupid but one of the things i remember most clearly from the opening of uncharted 4 was when nathan takes off this swimming flipper and throws it all the way down to the surface of the boat i know it's stupid and little and this doesn't seem like it would be anything of note he's just taking off some flippers but for some reason this little detail stuck with me all these years nate offloads the gear having successfully accomplished the mission and goes to speak with jameson who he was conversing with over the radio it's here that we get to see what we were actually rescuing inside the crates that you helped recover is a bunch of copper one of the really good details here is just the sheer disappointment on nathan's face when he sees the copper inside surely he knew what was inside these crates before they recovered them after all jameson says that they've been hired by the client presumably the owner of this shipping container to recover it and when they requested that this be recovered i'm sure they probably communicated what was inside the crates for safety's sake but even so nathan appears disappointed that there's only copper inside the crates and makes a few sassy comments about it at first glance you might assume that he was hoping to find treasure inside these crates but that's not what they're actually communicating to the player here rather nathan is having these flashbacks to the times when he would recover things but they were filled with treasure he knew what was in these boxes when he brought them to the surface but it's nonetheless disappointing when he considers where he's been before this and what he's accomplished in the past it's the first sign that he's not happy with this new life that he's found jameson said that they're paying good money for the recovery of these items which would at the very least suggest that nathan in turn is going to be well compensated for it but even so this isn't what he wants to be doing and this is going to be the central theme for nathan drake's story arc over the course of the game he has settled down into this calm life with elena and now he's trying to work a relatively normal job but deep within him is the urge to explore and hunt down treasure he needs to live a dangerous life in order to feel fulfilled or at the very least that's what he currently needs to be happy and that struggle between the domesticized life with elena and the life of adventure that he feels he needs to be happy is going to be the central theme as we go through the following chapters regardless jameson offers a beer to celebrate the good day's work that they've had but nathan again somewhat upset that this is where he is in life declines the offer he said he just wants to do the paperwork go home and crash so jameson relents we then cut to him working on the paperwork in the office something i never expected to see nathan drake doing ever in my life and jameson reappears discussing a malaysia job apparently they've been working on getting permits that will allow them to recover objects at this site however it's been a long and hard trudge there's a lot of money to be made if they can recover the items at the bottom of the ocean where this ship is located but they don't have permits and nathan insists that if there's no permits it's a no-go no permits means no go i can't stress enough just how weird it is to hear nathan freaking drake saying he can't do something because he doesn't have the permits this is so antithetical to who he has been in previous games but that's not a bad thing the whole point of this game's story is that nate is struggling to reconcile this duality in his mind the life of adventure and the life of domestic bliss as far as he's concerned they are mutually exclusive either he goes off and lives this careless life doing whatever he wants to do putting himself in dangerous situations and fulfilling that desire for exploration and adventure that he's always had since he was a child or he marries elena settles down has a family and fulfills that side of his life's desire since the events of uncharted 3 nate has matured a fair amount he's setting aside all of the careless behavior that he so clearly and bombastically exhibited in uncharted 3 2 and 1 and is now trying to live life like an adult and in the next scene this point is reaffirmed as nate explores the attic where he's kept a lot of the trinkets from his adventures this is also just really cool for the player to see all of these items from the previous games make a reappearance and it's a good touch to let the player reminisce alongside nate and then there's a cute little moment where nate grabs a toy gun and runs around the attic shooting these little targets it allows the player to do something that's a little more engaging than just walking around and looking at objects and also lets them live vicariously through nate and i guess more specifically nate's imagination and i also have to point out that on several of these targets that he's set up in the attic are the faces of the villains from the previous games which i think is kind of cute just the idea that nathan drake buys this very nice house goes up in the attic makes it his little man den and then creates these targets with the faces of these obscure mercenaries and crazy people so that he can shoot them with a toy gun it's just funny to me but also seems very much like something he would do over the following moments we get to explore the house and again i've said it before i will continue to say it naughty dog is really really good at populating these houses such that they feel lived in and authentic they did a great job in the last of us with making that house and the opening feel real and lived in and they're doing a fantastic job in uncharted 4 making this house feel real everything from the bathroom which has random containers of vaseline and tissue boxes strewn about towels laying on the floor and a bath rug that isn't lined up perfectly to all of the meticulously laid out post-it notes that are found at elena's desk all of it shows a fantastic attention to detail and reaffirms just why we all love naughty dog's environments so very much there's a lot of stuff up here for you to find and look at if you choose to such as a wedding album where you can see that nate and elena have married which up to this point in the game is not something that the player would have known you could have inferred it from his hand where he's wearing a wedding ring but if you were to do that i think you deserve some extra credit i don't think most people will be able to do that once you go downstairs you can see elena working on her laptop while sitting on the couch she's prepped dinner so you grab the bowls and a drink and bring it over that you sit on the couch and share in a conversation while eating elena is very engaged but nate is somewhat disconnected after a few moments elena starts to describe the article that she's working on but nate catches a glimpse of a picture that's mounted on the wall as elena's voice fades into the distance we see nate just stare again he's fantasizing about the life that he feels as though he should be living or at the very least a part of him wishes he were living but it doesn't last long elena snaps him out of it and asks if he can tell her what her article was actually about testing the player and nate in turn and surprisingly enough we're given dialogue options now this is the first time that we've seen the game present the player with an option as far as dialogue is concerned after all naughty dog games have always been incredibly linear so my initial thought when i saw this back in 2016 was oh wow we have a story with branching options now that's not actually the case this is just giving the player an opportunity to try some different options and test the waters but ultimately all of these options are wrong and you will get the same scene playing out regardless as we've said before this is just an occasion of naughty dog giving the illusion of choice to the player it doesn't matter what you choose the outcome will be the same i don't have an issue with this as long as the outcome is worth having and the phenomenal voice acting and writing of the dialogue that plays out after you make whatever selection you do makes this scene worth it elena can read nate like a book and she can see immediately that something is off so she prods him and when he tells her about the malaysia job and how he's declined it she's proud and yet frustrated at the same time nate insists that they as a couple agreed not to do this type of job anymore so he's cutting it off he's not even gonna think about it and she in turn presses him asking if he should call sully who he hasn't seen in two years to discuss the project maybe it's something they could actually pull off but he wants to shut the whole conversation down furthermore this is also the first time that we hear sully disgust so we know that he's still around and will likely make an appearance though i suppose it should be noted that sully was actually teased in multiple of the trailers before launch but regardless the two continue their conversation until it stalls out elena stands up to do the dishes but nate insists that he should do them or at the very least they should play for the right to do the dishes and in what was probably the biggest surprise for me in 2016 when this game launched we get the chance to play crash bandicoot one of the original games that naughty dog worked on way back in the day and you're asked to beat elena's high score but it should be noted that at this point you can't actually do so because it requires an extra life again the illusion of choice and i suppose looking back i could have just you know googled whether or not this was possible instead of trying it repeatedly but you know what you live and you learn so inevitably elena is the winner and her reaction is adorable the two share a kiss and we flash forward to nate in what we can only assume is the very early morning hours doing paperwork at the office and then someone shows up sam this reveal will probably hit the player and nate just about as hard it's given little warning and comes out of effectively nowhere understandably nate has some questions here about how he survived where he's been all these years insisting that he tried searching for him but that all he could ever find were records that he was dead and sam quickly casts these assertions aside by saying that he was in fact shot he in fact shows the player and nay to the scars but that he was patched up by the doctors at the prison and thrown right back in a cell to rot away and it's implied that they forged all of those documents saying that he was dead because they wanted to effectively lock him away and throw away the key sam then immediately transitions the conversation back towards nate and the two sit on this bench overlooking the harbor where nate's office is located and nate retells all of the stories from the previous games and they poke a little bit of fun at the whole premise of uncharted as a series as well with sam pointing out that nate has managed to find some of the most highly coveted treasures of all of human history and hasn't managed to come out even a millionaire nate says that he's managed to grab some stuff which he used to pay off for example the house and the engagement rings to elena which is at which point nate realizes that he told all of these stories that included elena but never mentioned that he was currently married to her he then says that sam has to come over and meet her for dinner that night at which point he realizes that he has to tell elena which is the first time that the player will now see that nate hasn't mentioned his dead brother to elena over all these years now there's two things of note here for one he forgot to mention that he was married to elena which is a huge thing to forget to mention as you're telling these stories now this communicates in my mind two things first and foremost that nate hasn't fully processed these events which is why his relationship shift with elena specifically that he's married to her now hasn't really settled in because if it had as he told the stories he would say that now elena who i'm married to by the way i'll get to that part of the story later on comes around and does this this and this instead he tells these stories with elena present but doesn't acknowledge their current relationship status which again is a major detail to leave out the second thing is that nate hasn't told elena that he has an older brother and certainly not that his older brother was killed when they broke into a panamanian prison trying to access a secret clue for a highly sought-after treasure the only explanation that i can think of as to why nate wouldn't tell elena that he had an older brother would be if he was highly ashamed of him or if the topic were just so emotionally challenging that he didn't want to broach it the first explanation makes sense to me if you're really ashamed of a sibling or family member you probably don't talk about them or bring them up very often at all i mean sure i could point out that when you're married everything should be out on the table but that's beside the point the latter explanation specifically saying that sam's life and in turn death would just be too painful to address with his wife i don't find that excuse to hold much water either what we do know especially after seeing these two reconnect is that sam and nate have an intense bond with each other nate loves sam and sam loves nate after all they were orphans and for a long time they were the only family that the other had so i'm sorry i just don't buy either of these excuses and this brings us to the third option which is that this was simply the best that naughty dog could do to explain why sam hadn't been present or even mentioned in previous games that it was just so emotionally challenging for nate to bring up that he simply never did but the problem is there are moments in the previous games when villains would have a very good reason to bring this information up especially if they did their homework and realized that nate's older brother hadn't actually died and was still alive such as marlowe in uncharted 3 it simply doesn't make sense that while she's rifling through all of this information about nate's childhood his mother and personal relationships why she wouldn't also bring up that he had an older brother who either died in a panamanian jail which she could use to hold over his head and mock him with or if she did a little bit more research she could have found out that he didn't actually die in that panamanian jail and was still alive information that she could have used to hold over nate's head to get him to cease the hunt for the treasure leave her alone and abandon this quest to stop her and the explanation as i mentioned back when we covered uncharted 3 is just that naughty dog hadn't invented sam as a character yet so they just didn't mention it because they hadn't thought it up and this is one of the few occasions in naughty dog games where you have to just kind of get over it does sam's existence make any sense considering the first three uncharted games no not at all in fact there's a lot of stuff that actively goes against the notion of nate having a brother and family that he can rely on through his childhood in fact in many ways that actively degradates the relationship with sully but setting all of that aside we're here now i also feel as though i need to communicate my theory as to why they concocted sam as a character for one i think they like the idea of having flashbacks and flash forwards and then also having betrayal and hidden motives that are so close to nate and the idea of family that's reinforcing this adventure narrative paired with another segment of his family in the form of elena pushing the domesticized calm life idea and pursuit on nade and these dueling goals for his life being constantly presented in the form of family members that he can't escape i understand why they would want to push those and present those to the player it makes sense and the fact that it's family members doing it makes it inescapable what i actually think happened is that after the overwhelming success of the last of us neil druckmann decided that he really wanted to work with troy baker again after all he's a phenomenal talent and as a voice actor is unmatched so in an attempt to try and lock him down as talent especially moving into the last of us part two neil druckmann decided that they needed to sign troy baker on to another project to keep him loyal or at the very least present as they started workshopping some ideas for the last of his part too this meant that they had to find a role for him to fit in and because it's troy freaking baker it couldn't be a small spin-off role he needed to be supporting main cast at the very least so they created sam as a character put troy baker in place and called it a day but setting that aside now it's time for sam to explain what happened over the last decade or two sam reveals to nate that he's in trouble with some sort of drug lord who's named hector alcazar apparently this was his cellmate at that same panamanian jail where they tried to escape the first time we then get another flashback where we see sam in prison working out much older than the last time we saw him alcazar invites sam to stand up by the cell door with him and starts discussing things in philosophical terms about the small lives of the guards and all of the inmates ambitions being limited by their current lot in life he then asks sam what he will do when he gets out and sam says that if he ever gets out he's going to search for and find avery's treasure which obviously he has incessantly referenced time and time again every time he talks to anybody we'll find out later that sam was apparently presented with multiple books by a guard that he had cozied up to so all he's been doing for all of these years is studying up on the case trying to find new clues and information as to where the treasure could be we then hear a distant noise and alcazar turns to sam and says that it's their opportunity and out of nowhere a bunch of armed men appear and open the cell door letting alcazar and sam out alcazar the extremely wealthy and powerful drug lord has called upon his men to free him they've broken into the prison blown up a bunch of stuff and provided a way out and the implication of alcazar's comments are that he's going to let sam out with him if he finds the treasure and can in turn provide a cut of it to alcazar if not the whole thing over the next few minutes you fight your way out of the prison going through many of the same rooms and areas that you went through as nate in the initial escape sequence that we played through at the beginning of the game i don't mind all of this being recycled i think it's a necessary evil to show two breakouts of the same prison you know who am i to complain but nonetheless it's important to note that this is all recycled what isn't recycled is this last moment as you push up to the guard tower where there is a machine gun going off at you eventually one of alcazar's men is able to blow it up with an rpg and the tower collapses freeing the way for alcazar sam and all of his men to escape the prison once and for all the crew eventually makes their way to a van and drives off into the distance leaving the prison behind in flames in the van alcazar offers sam a drink and asks what's next for him sam talks about relaxing and trying to find his brother nate of course at which point alcazar shuts him down and asks point blank how long it will take him to find avery's treasure sam gives him a very flip-floppy non-committal answer making alcazar stop the van and have his men pull sam out and hold a gun to his head the drug lord says that he likes sam and believes that he could actually find the treasure but then now he has his doubts he puts a knife to sam's throat and asks clearly how long it will take sam says six months and in turn alcazar says that people always ask for more time than they actually need with this type of thing it's almost like he's done it before so he gives him three months and demands half the treasure upon its discovery he threatens that if sam hides the treasure runs or goes to the police he will know and in turn will come after him with the rules of the game clearly established alcazar pulls sam up to his feet gives him water cash and directions to the nearest town sam asks how he could possibly contact alcazar when he finds the treasure at which point the drug kingpin simply says that he'll be there he then drives off with all of his men leaving sam behind we then fade to sam and nate at the end of the story saying that they need to pick up the trail where they left off because it's the only way that sam can survive nate says that he and rafe did try and locate the treasure after sam's untimely demise specifically saying that they used rafe's fortune or at least part of it to buy the cathedral in scotland that the clue initially led them to apparently they combed the place for weeks and found absolutely nothing innate says that rafe is still looking and searching that property after all of these years but hasn't found anything either sam says that he isn't actually surprised because he's done some digging of his own and found something that rafe hasn't found and then he hands nade a paper with an auction lot for saint dismiss's cross which is intact unlike the one they found at the top of the prison tower this leads them to conclude that avery made more than one cross and hid them all throughout the world and this leads the brothers to assume that whatever was missing out of their panamanian cross is located inside this new cross which is being auctioned off very soon speaking of the auction it's being put on at the rossi estate which is in effect a black market auction where crime lords and slimy businessmen from all over the world come to buy and sell antiquities nate asks how sam plans on getting an invitation and outbidding very rich criminals at which point sam says that he won't bid on it and that instead they will simply steal it nate initially shows a little bit of resistance saying that he doesn't do that type of work anymore and he's moved on he's married he's got a good job and a life in a house but sam says that he needs nate's help as he's the only person he trusts with his life nate says there has to be another way but sam using the credibility he's garnered after researching the avery case for so long says that there's simply no other way and after all of his research this is their only option to making progress so nate concludes that this is what they have to do he pulls out his phone and gives a telephone call to elena saying that jameson has just walked in with the permits to the malaysian job which of course is a lie but he's doing this so he can try and save his brother now i know what you may be thinking why didn't nate poke or prod sam at all you would think he'd want to do a little story verification after not seeing his brother for years and years and years and i'll say that would be very reasonable of you to request more information i mean surely sam wouldn't lie about something like this or at the very least surely there isn't more information that isn't being communicated right well we'll get to that later the camera then fades to salmon nate in boiler suits on a cliff overlooking the aforementioned rossi estate sam says that there's no signs of sully who they've brought in for this job which establishes of course that sully is going to be here what's interesting is that sam does not trust sully at all and is actually quite upset that they've gotten him involved saying that he doesn't trust sully and that sully will double-cross them blah blah blah we're not given a lot of information on the relationship between sam and sully but we can only assume that when sully came into nate's life something wasn't quite as sturdy as it was with sully and nate while sully effectively played the role of a father figure to nate in his early years it seems as though sam never made that connection but i think there's more to this hesitation that we'll discuss later on for now just remember that sam doesn't trust sully setting that aside for now in the distance nate and sam can see a light flickering inside the estate it's sully signaling them that he's opened the window and they're clear to come in so the two push up around the exterior of the state along the ocean it's also here that we're introduced to a new mechanic the grappling hook which is probably one of my favorite gameplay mechanics in the entirety of the uncharted series granted there's not a lot but nonetheless i really like it you platform around the outside and climb your way all the way up to that window where the light was blinking the two take off their boiler suits and climb in dressed to the nines in tuxes inside we see sully sitting and smoking classic nate and sully hug while sam and sully share what can only be described as a cold greeting it's not clear if sam blames sully for what happened to him or failing to realize that he was stuck in there all this time or if there's something more going on here that's causing sam to give sully the cold shoulder and not trust him again i think there is something going on here that explains sam's behavior but we'll get to that in just a little bit but it's going to spoil things that happen later so for now we'll leave it there it's weird how they're treating each other and causes a bit of unease between the player nate sam and sully regardless the old man takes the brothers to the mezzanine and shows them that the cross is now out next to the auctioneer not actually in storage where they expected it to be in addition the lot order has been changed by someone wealthy because wealthy people make everything difficult they find out that the bidding is set to start in about 15 minutes setting a clear time deadline for what you need to accomplish sam throws out that in prison you wait till the lights go out to get anything dirty done so in this case they need to do the same thing the group pulls out the blueprints for the rossi estate which they've acquired somehow and find the electricity panel they decide that they need to shut off the electrical panel to black out the lights and steal the cross but considering there's at least one or two backup generators that will kick in shortly after they'll have to be very quick and so with a clear game plan in mind they assign duties nate will kill the lights sam will be the waiter and sully will keep an eye on the cross in the meantime which considering that it's just sitting on a table and there's all these other people present just means that sully's gonna smoke and drink while the other two do stuff you gotta love sully the crew goes downstairs to the main level amongst the crowd and tries to sneak into a back area where waiters are going to and from but it's locked with a key card access panel so you pickpocket a key card and what i thought was going to be a more established mini game throughout the course of the title but it turns out that this is just a one-off in effect this is not going to be a mainstay of the gameplay system you're just grabbing a quick key card and instead of making this a quick time event or just a cutscene they decided to make it a little bit more involved which i can appreciate funnily enough if you fail this little mini game too many times the waiter will eventually walk off and sam will take over it's a fun little beat that shakes everything loose compared to what you've been doing up to this point and it's also a good excuse for some bonding between nate and sam with sam causing a distraction and nate pulling off the lift which apparently is something they used to do a lot when they were kids after you've gotten the card you go to the same door with access inside now sully hands out ear pieces so you can all communicate easily between each other and dismisses the two of you into the inner workings of the building he turns back to the main hall and walks in where he discovers a woman named nadine she greets him by telling him to put his hands in the air in a very suave way they share some brief dialogue with sully saying things like he barely recognizes her out of her fatigues and the two complement each other back and forth but with an odd tension nadine says it's a relief to see another english speaker even if he is american and she is south african and soon after nadine leaves to get the two a drink apparently they have some sort of history though unlikely it's sexual it is at the very least one that has a bit of attention present once she's out of earshot sully tells the two boys that she owns an army for hire called shoreline and that apparently he's had run-ins with them in the past again whatever that means is not clear it's left very vague what isn't left vague is that sully knows if she's here something serious is going on so nate and sam push through the bowels of the building through various wine cellars and food storage areas even coming upon the guard's mess hall once outside you go through a couple of vistas and eventually pull a ladder down outside of a break area for the waiters hanging off the ledge a waiter sees you and asks you what you're doing at which point sam comes out clocks him across the face and drags him back inside having acquired the costume he will need to pull off the role as the waiter so now left alone nate pushes on to accomplish his mission specifically to get to the very top of the complex where he can shut off the electrical panel allowing sam to swipe the cross soon after we cut back to the main hall where we see nadine and sully conversing once again but rafe comes out of nowhere to begin conversing with sully as well nadine asks when she'll get to meet sully's partner nate and sully explains that nate's out married and is no longer in the business reef then throws in some awkward jokes about nate being as good as dead if he's not active in the game anymore and sully throws back some awkward dialogue pointing out that rafe is still running mommy and daddy's business and enjoying all of the profits as a result even though he hasn't actually accomplished anything himself it's then revealed that nadine is working for rafe and that's why she's here this causes solely much concern because he knows that nadine's company doesn't get involved in frivolous matters they are the muscle you hire when you need results and it's here when everything clicks into place rafe knows about the cross and is here to buy it he also probably rubbed some elbows to make sure that the order of the bidding would be rearranged so that he could swoop in and get the cross and furthermore he has nadine here so that she can supervise and make sure nothing goes awry and rafe not being an idiot also knows that sully would only be here if he was honestly interested in acquiring something and the only thing here that would interest sully in the slightest is the cross so he tells sully to cut the [ __ ] and not to bid on the cross otherwise bad things will happen knocking a drink out of his hand and causing a scene but sully plays it cool and plays dumb saying that he's not going to get involved and he's just here to have a good time the group disengages though and as silly walks away he tries to communicate through the earpiece to nate that he needs to hurry up but the communication fails because nate is on the outskirts surrounded by stone so that your piece isn't working we then cut back to nate still climbing around trying to reach the electrical room also really small detail i know it's insignificant and kind of stupid but i found this really cool this bar that's on the outskirts of the villa that you're climbing up actually bends underneath your weight so as you cross it it bevels out and bows under your weight i know this is a very small detail and nobody else probably cares about this but it's such a nice little detail that naughty dog didn't need to include but they did anyways i felt as though it was deserving of some praise i mean seriously what other studio would be like hey we have a character climbing across a metal bar let's go and add a little bit of strain to it so it bows under his weight no one else would do that i mean other studios releasing aaa games charging the same price as naughty dog are releasing games with broken releases bugs that cause save file corruptions or hard crashes and naughty dog is over here bending metal for sake of detail it's just another example of naughty dog making everybody else look as though they're not even trying regardless nate eventually finds his way inside the electrical room you find a crowbar break into the electrical section of the room and shut off the power but of course he only does so after sully has messed with rafe just a little bit to buy nate enough time to find the crowbar to break into the electrical room needless to say sully having the gall to bid on the cross while rafe is trying to buy it pisses him off thoroughly once the powers shut off the lights are out for a brief moment and when they come back on the cross is gone sam has successfully swiped it rafe turns once he realizes what's happened rafe turns and sees sully going into the cellar and chases him at which point a guard stops him but rafe knows who's responsible now his enemy is established and we know that this is not the last time we're going to be seeing rafe and or nadine we're now in full escape mode the power to the complex is off and all of the guards are on high alert you climb across several rooftops trying to escape and eventually fire erupts but nate is able to narrowly escape inside a very large office space filled with bookshelves and desks upon opening the door he's greeted by nadine and i'm sure i don't have to say this but how did she know to go to this room like how did she know that nathan drake was climbing up this area and that she'd find the perpetrator of all of these issues in this room like i get it you need to set up this little boss fight to show that nadine is really powerful and that you need to be worried about her but like come on now this little fist fight actually caused a lot of drama back when the game launched mainly because nadine cannot be beaten here now i don't actually have a problem with scripted fight sequences that give the illusion of choice and variety and player agency while keeping you on strict train tracks again this is just something that naughty dog does they give you the illusion of choice while keeping you on a set path and that's okay what isn't okay is that this just doesn't make any sense at all for one nadine being here in the first place doesn't make sense the power to the entire complex was just shut off and the one object that her boss wanted to buy has gone missing so instead of searching the people in that room trying to find the object she goes up to this bizarrely out of place tower to go into a library where she'll find something it's not as though she was watching security cameras and tracked him there it's not as though she knew that this was the only route he could land at she didn't even know that nathan drake was in the business still the point is the writers needed to have nadine show up here because they wanted to have a fist fight where nadine could beat up nate and where she could assert her dominance over him and the second piece that upset a lot of people that i think is also fair is that nathan drake is a trained killer this is a man who depending on how you played the previous games has massacred thousands of highly trained militant guards people will say well nadine is also highly trained and is militarily specialized in what she does at which point i would say well yeah so was everyone that nathan drake killed in the previous games and so the only thing that you can do to explain away her dominance over nate here is say that she's more in practice compared to nate as far as fighting is concerned and that in turn nate is rusty because he hasn't killed anybody in a hot minute but i just don't buy it because nate continues to massacre dozens of people over the course of the next half hour of gameplay nate isn't presented to the player as somebody grossly out of practice and out of shape rather he's just as good as he always has been and the extent of his rustiness is small little dialogue quips where nate says that he's really tired or he used to be able to jump higher things like that and this is why i just don't think it's acceptable to assert that nadine could not just defeat nathan drake in this instance but could utterly demolish him this isn't even a fair fight she is throwing him around like he is made of flower petals it it's not even competitive and i hate to be this guy that's bringing this up i mean i'm not the quartering i have a few brain cells to rub together but i can't help but notice that this doesn't make any sense within the world that naughty dog has established and it was only put in here so that nadine could show off how much of a badass she is and how much better she is than nathan drake at fighting and all things physical it's not just that she's a female character who isn't particularly likable or interesting it's that nothing about her would suggest that she is more qualified or better enabled than nate at asserting her dominance in this fight if she was seven foot six and weighed 350 pounds or was like helga in the last of us part two that would make sense and i would not have an issue here because size can often overwhelm technique but nadine is a relatively small woman who is certainly fit but not fit enough to overwhelm a trained mass murderer i didn't have a problem with helga overpowering abby in the last of his part 2 because that made sense and was reasonable and it passed the sniff test meaning that you look at helga it makes sense that she could throw someone around like a ragdoll nadine i don't believe it there is another example later on in the game that more clearly asserts this weird fantasy that the writers seem to have with extremely buff women overpowering men but we'll get to that later the point is for now i just want to make it clear that this doesn't make any sense and seems to have just been constructed as a scene so that nadine could overpower nathan it's again some sort of weird construction where the writers just wanted to see these buff women overpower men it it's odd really odd i don't get it and it's not the only time we'll see this setting all of that aside for now nadine hurls nate out of the window he grabs on to the curtain and is able to cling on to a flag post underneath i guess maybe this isn't for flags maybe banners would be more accurate but either way he grabs on to this and you climb your way across the rooftops again eventually landing inside the main hall where you started all of this here you reconnect with sam and fight through waves of enemies and i feel as though i have to mention at this point just how much better the shooting feels in this game compared to uncharted 3. not just are the environments much more destructible and interactable but they're also just more interesting to look at the enemies are smarter and move more dynamically it's just better across the board nate and sully fight their way through the courtyard and eventually sully swings in with his massive very fancy car through the front gate and they all climb in escaping together the crew goes back to their hotel room and opens up the cross inside is a scroll with avery's insignia on it it's an image with the inscription hodi mekum eres in paradiso meaning today you will join me in paradise which is what jesus said to saint dismiss as they died in addition there are also the dates of avery's birth and his death and the crew works out that they need to find avery's grave at st dismisses cathedral in scotland the same property that rafe bought they realized that the reason why rafe hasn't made any progress is because he's been searching the cathedral when he needs to be searching the graveyard which is apparently pretty far from the cathedral sam and nate assert that they're going to scotland but sully warns that rafe is certainly going to be waiting there and nate blindly dismisses him he asserts that they are close to discovering the biggest pirate treasure of all time but solely rightly points out that this is supposed to be about saving sam's life and not about finding the big treasure realizing that he's been called out nate backpedals pretty quickly saying it's about both because they can't save sam's life without also finding the treasure which is what he meant to say but this is the first time we really see these two conflicting motivations present nate initially agreed to help sam on this mission because he wanted to save his big brother but now we're seeing that he's losing sight of that and is starting to chase the treasure more than anything sully then asks how elena is okay with all of this and based on nate's face realizes that elena doesn't actually know that they're out doing all of this nate gives the excuse that she simply wouldn't understand and solely says that he's not giving her enough credit which is certainly true the truth is that nate doesn't want to risk elena talking him out of pursuing the treasure he's also burdened with all of the lies and withholdings of information that he's presented elena over the years specifically not telling her that he has a freaking brother but i think at the core of it is simply the desire on nate's part to find the treasure that he's been fantasizing about for all his life when nate says that elena simply wouldn't get it or wouldn't understand he's not talking about the need to get the treasure to save sam's life he's saying that she wouldn't understand his intense desire to find this treasure she simply wouldn't understand the obsession and that is perhaps fair i don't think she would understand it and as we'll see in the coming sections of the game even when she does eventually discover the lie she doesn't understand why nate is so incessant on going and pursuing this it's only later that she starts to piece it together and figure out what's driving him but for now nate isn't going to admit fault or any misdeed so he gets up from the table sarcastically thanks them for the input and leaves to call elena as he walks out onto the deck to call her we can hear him engage in the conversation saying some crap about the malaysia job where she thinks he is once alone sam and sully share an awkward conversation it's here that we get to see what they actually think of each other sully asserts that he's sorry for what happened to sam but that it isn't nate's fault and it certainly isn't sully's fault he tells sam that it took a long time for nate to get out but sam says that nate's chosen to get back into the treasure hunting game because he's made for this kind of life he's made to be an adventurer which is perhaps true he tells sam that it took nate a long time to get out of the treasure hunting business and that he's finally where he should be happy with a wife and house not risking his life day in day out for sake of some treasure that they don't even know exists but sam is totally unapologetic saying that he's been pulled back into the adventurer's life because this is what he was made to do which i think is actually probably correct sully follows up trying to make it clear that he's just keeping an eye out for nate because somebody has to which point sam gets pretty pissed because this of course implies that sam is not looking out for the best interests of his younger brother which i think the reason this perturbs him is because it's absolutely correct sam does not have nate's best interests at heart which is why he's doing all of this and this will be made all the more clear in the coming sections but again we'll get to that in just a little bit for now just know that sam isn't being completely honest here and while we're here i'll also mention that i'm not sure if i'm the only one but i never really felt as though sam was trustworthy i don't know if he's supposed to come off as trustworthy only for that mask to be ripped off later or if he's supposed to come off as kind of slimy and scummy throughout the entire game but to me he always seemed like a scumbag i don't know let me know your thoughts in the comment section below i want to know if i'm alone in this as nate re-enters he tells elena that the job is just taking longer than expected which he explains way is actually being the truth because the job not the malaysian job but rather seeking out avery's treasure is taking longer than they expected the crew reasserts that they're all still in for seeking the treasure even if they disagree on each other's core motivations so we transition to scotland where we see sam and nate standing alone with the cathedral being worked on in the distance it's also established that sully is sitting in his plane down on the water primed for an escape and that he doesn't want to go navigating all of these caves and exploring graveyards that he's too old for that in the opening dialogue sully asserts that he really doesn't have a good feeling about this stuff but he trusts nate at the end of the day and so nate and sam begin working their way to the graveyard the next several chapters will try actively to shake up the monotony of the gameplay that we've experienced up to this point there will be a lot more navigation vertically a lot more free climbing and stealth though it should be noted it is very easy to slip into open combat arenas if you happen to screw up and get spotted it's also important to note that the next couple of chapters will be spent exclusively with sam i was looking forward to this finally a chance for nate and sam to catch up maybe sam would let a few things loose that he had been withholding up until this point maybe we would get a little bit closer to the truth of what actually happened back in that prison and how he managed to survive this long after all i think most players will agree that sam is probably withholding something you can't put your finger on it but he doesn't come off as entirely honest something that i think is probably very intentional considering the detail with which neil druckmann directs these scenes but unfortunately the dialogue between these two never really goes beyond general banter or discussions of the general setup of the scene what i mean is that instead of discussing their relationship with each other and catching up on things that they might not have shared up until this point they go back and forth explaining why rafe's men are where they currently are what they might be doing in this area what their motivations or goals would be and why they haven't found the treasure yet in other words they spend most of this time discussing basic exposition that's meant to justify this sequence to the player i can understand why they did it but just because something is necessary or explainable it doesn't mean that it is fun or enjoyable for the player i don't know it could also be that i simply have played through this game a few times at this point so this isn't new for me and as a result the dialogue feels very very plain and bland but i can't really evaluate this at this point since i can't re-experience the game for the first time what i can say is that even after playing through the game all these times through the game looks fantastic and the scottish wilderness landscapes and cliff faces are fantastically well realized the level design feels natural and as you climb and navigate your way around the cliff tops it feels very organic nothing feels overtly contrived or as though it was constructed specifically for the purposes of a video game and that's good because this section is going to last for a couple of hours and if it didn't feel natural this would come off as a real trudge speaking of trudges nate and sam pushed their way around a few cliff tops through a few groups of enemies and eventually fight their way into a small steeple next to a graveyard it's at this graveyard where they believe that henry avery was actually buried at least this is where his grave marker happens to be you look around on a few different tombstones eventually finding the one that matches the drawing that nate has in his notebook telling you that this is the place to be not to mention it also is like the coolest tombstone in the entire graveyard which should also have been a dead giveaway but just pointing that out and what can only be described as an indiana jones inspired moment nate turns the skull inside of the tombstone something which nobody has done in the hundreds of years this has been here immediately behind the tombstone a series of stone blocks drop into the ground revealing a stairway into a cavern below inside there's a bunch of sarcophagi filling out the crypt as far as the two can tell this crypt has been here far longer than the tombstone was and the secret entrance was added later to cover it up since it contained a clue to the whereabouts of his treasure we then have a very basic puzzle where we align some beams of light with lenses on the back wall and upon the successful completion of this task the doors open wide revealing a large glass structure behind we can see three crosses and a cave that are circled with an etching on the glass lens for the window it's clear this cave is where you're supposed to go once again i could point out how absolutely ridiculous it is for somebody to hide the secret clues of their treasure in this bizarre rabbit trail sort of way but this is just part of the territory when it comes to these types of stories and kitschy games i can look past it because it's fun but we can still acknowledge that it's patently absurd that somebody would do this i can understand how somebody would argue that this is how the pirates would protect their treasure by making sure only the people that really wanted it would ever stand a chance of finding it but it doesn't make it any more absurd you exit the graveyard and begin pushing on towards the cave along the way you go through a few stealth sequences which are really really easy to screw up which will inevitably lead to a large shootout i've gotten through a couple of these without killing anybody but for the most part it will eventually devolve into a gunfight there's no hard fail state if this happens so most of the time people won't reload and will simply fight clearing out the enemies one by one i understand why they do this for sake of immersion that if you're discovered you simply have to fight your way out of the bad situation but it's still frustrating that they don't push you harder into navigating these levels stealthily because they are built very carefully to allow you to do just that and it's something we know naughty dog can do we saw it with the last of us and of course with the last of us part two the difference is that in those games if you're discovered the combat ramps up in difficulty significantly if you're playing as joel or ellie and you're discovered while stealthing your way through a section of the map you can technically fight your way through but thanks to the scarce resources and the extreme power with which the enemies can attack you in many cases it's smarter to just reload and try again saving your ammunition and resources for an encounter that will actually demand it but an uncharted since these resources are so numerous especially on any of the normal difficulty settings even the hard difficulty settings for the most part most people are probably just going to push through fighting their way through collecting new weapons swapping everything out so they end up right where they began after this encounter it's not a huge deal for sake of gameplay but narratively i think it is very significant nate and sam have a vested interest in rafe not knowing that they're in scotland because after all they're hoping to sneak in and steal the treasure out from under his nose again remember at this point they still think the treasure is in scotland where they currently are if ray finds out that they're running around killing his men he will be on high alert and know to look for them but if they were to go through this entire sequence completely stealthily then he wouldn't find out that they were present he wouldn't know that they were still a threat and likely would still think that they were out of the game or dead if this dynamic duo were able to get through this entire scottish section without being detected it would serve their interests much better for one they might be able to actually swoop in and steal the treasure and secondly it wouldn't put their life at danger and thirdly rafe wouldn't know that they would need to return to scotland to continue seeking the treasure in fact rafe probably wouldn't know that there was anything significant back at the graveyard and would continue just blowing up this cathedral for no apparent reason in other words it's incredibly reckless and irresponsible for nate and sam to go through these levels tolerating their own discovery narratively speaking i think there should be a hard fail state if you're discovered at any point during this mission but unfortunately this doesn't happen if you're discovered rafe's men radio openly saying that they have two people attacking them killing them all over the place notifying nadine and in turn rafe as we'll see in a cut scene in just a moment and defectively killing any chance that they would have at actually acquiring the treasure without notifying rafe and to put a bow on all of this remember rafe owns this property free and clear completely legally rafe has every right to be searching this area blowing stuff up because he owns the land nate and sam are trespassing they don't have a right to be here and that is beyond question if they were to find the treasure and rafe find out that they had found the treasure on his property they would have no legal claim to it and rafe with his countless resources and his ability to demonstrate that nate and sam had killed dozens of his men to acquire this treasure on his property would surely go through the courts to claim the treasure even if nate and sam were to find it there's just no other way of looking at it it is patently stupid for nate and sam to be okay with being seen the game's writers and designers should not tolerate the player being discovered they should have a hard fail state and if you happen to be discovered you should be forced to restart that sequence and get through it stealthily for narrative reasons if you need rafe to discover the pair as i think they needed him to do fine so be it you can write that in in a cut scene later when it's beyond the player's control but to allow the player to play so cavalierly without any regard for what is actually going on narratively in the meta discussion of what's happening within the story it's just really lazily and sloppily done in my opinion especially for a naughty dog game that usually takes these kinds of things into consideration regardless we continue pushing through and we start to do some of the hardcore free climbing that we discussed a few moments ago here the player will be climbing all over these cliffsides along these really interesting geological formations and even swinging along ramps and over debris that's been left after centuries of collapse and degradation i've said it before i'll say it again i understand that many people find these free climbing sequences to be boring bland and monotonous but i actually enjoy them i think the free climbing system while nowhere near as robust as assassin's creed unities or other games that we've seen in recent memory is still serviceable and i think relatively enjoyable i will grant you that a lot of the time it just turns into x-mashing where you just spam the x button to jump along ladders or cliff faces quickly but i think usually the movement and the actions that nate performs in response to your inputs feels fair and feels appropriate for what you are trying to get him to do the worst thing that can be said for these types of games that have free climbing systems is when you expect the player character to do something and they do the opposite such as in assassin's creed when you're running along expect the character to climb up one wall but instead he jumps clean off of it sending you down flying to your death that almost never happened to me in the multiple run-throughs of uncharted 4 that i've played it's always managed to feel fair and very responsive so i think that's a point in their favor the level designers also started to mix up a lot of different systems such as the free climbing the swinging stealth combat and gun play such as this arena in this arena you can swing around you can hide in the tall grass you can shoot people outright or you can just stealth your way around using these aforementioned assets these levels are i think the most interesting of the entire group and thankfully there are many more of them as the game progresses the opening hours of the game featured very typical uncharted shooting arenas which were flat bland and boring but these shooting arenas are much more interesting featuring verticality lots of varied and dynamic movement and even built-in stealth tool sets and opportunities that you wouldn't expect to be here while the ai isn't the brightest and you'll find yourself sitting on cliff ledges for extended period of times waiting for an enemy to walk where they need to i still think that this is a market improvement over the previous games and i think it's worthy of loudation this same formula of free climb shooting gallery free climb shooting gallery repeats a few times until eventually nate and sam find their way into an icy cavern inside this cave the two find a door next to the door is a hole in the wall that reminded me of every single action film ever where the hero sticks his arm in and pretends that he's hurt it's such a cliche but you know what they had to do it at least once he reaches in and pulls a lever that he feels on the inside and the door swings open inside the next room there are a few skeletons and a sign that reads quote for those who prove worthy paradise awaits for those who prove false behold your grim fate but the sign itself was not left by henry avery rather it was left by the rhode island pirate thomas ii sam says this couldn't possibly be because thomas ii died trying to claim avery's treasure as his own nate points out that these were just stories and that the truth may actually be different from what the stories communicated baffled the team pushes on eventually finding a very elaborate and yet oddly beautiful puzzle this puzzle is actually pretty straightforward basically you have to make sure that the bucket is at the very top of this arrangement with the crosses in their proper alignment in the light i wouldn't say it's difficult it's just tedious unfortunately that's a criticism that can be levied against most of the puzzles in uncharted 4. it brings to mind the core question that i think should be at a lot of people's minds which is whether or not tedium can constitute fun and should be tolerated or if it is just what it sounds like a tedious activity meant to pad out gameplay time i understand that not everything can tie in perfectly with the metanarrative of the game and some elements of the game's design will have to be just for that for sake of the game's design once again you can bring into question whether or not this puzzle would actually test the average aspiring pirate and filter out those who weren't worthy but i think that that conversation isn't really worth having because again this is more about challenging the player padding out gameplay time and making things relatively interesting and engaging as you explore these caves instead of just having a simple cave path for you to run along but inevitably that's what happens the two continue to push their way through eventually ending up underneath the main cathedral they reach a wall as they climb along and the two standing side by side can hear a conversation between rafe and nadine through the cracks in the floor the two share a heated back and forth where they're effectively arguing which methodology is going to be the most efficacious moving forward rafes or nadines nadine's method is to blindly blow things up to try and find a large cavern underneath the cathedral which likely either houses the treasure or a clue that's necessary to find the treasure rafe wants to take a much more methodical approach trying to do things carefully and calculated in his mind if you use explosives willy-nilly you might find the cavern that you need to get into but if you blow up the cavern in the process there won't be anything to analyze sure if the cavern is filled with gold the gold won't mind the g-force or the potential destruction that could come you could always just dig it out but if the treasure isn't underneath the cathedral blowing up key pieces of evidence could lead to the treasure being lost forever nadine also brings up an interesting point such as the cross that was brought to auction which sam and nate stole rafe insists that the auction was the cleanest way to get the cross and that while they could have stolen it well beforehand according to nadine it wouldn't have been the most effective or clean way of doing it whatever that means but nadine points out that this was probably just done to get competition involved in other words rafe allowed the cross to end up in the auction because he secretly wanted sam and nate to steal it which would introduce competition which would help make progress discovering the treasure ray feels as though he hasn't made enough over these last few years trying to hunt it down and that he might actually need nate and sam's expertise reef rejects this saying that he didn't think drake would actually show up but nadine questions if rafe actually wanted to do this intentionally all along and if he's actually secretly happy this happened we'll leave the discussion there but keep this in mind because when we get to a major plot point that's revealed later in the game this conversation will have all new meaning i know that's tantalizing and mysterious but i have to leave it there if we're going to make any progress and avoid major spoilers so just sit tight after hearing this conversation nate and sam have a sense of urgency instilled in them nadine has just asserted that she's going to ramp up the explosions and try to get to the treasure quickly she's sick and tired of waiting and probably has heard rumblings that nate and sam are probably pretty close it's unclear at this point if she knows whether or not they are currently on the premises killing her men or if she has heard rumblings that this might be the case but either way she has a bad feeling about it i would say that it would be patently ridiculous for her not to know considering that they have walkie-talkies and this game takes place in the 21st century so surely somebody who was shot or injured called for help but we'll just set that aside for now there's a lot more platforming eventually leading to a large open area that contains what used to be a puzzle of some sort which has long since collapsed this is actually one of the more interesting areas of this whole series of levels it's a puzzle area but it's one that's collapsed and fallen apart you can only imagine what it used to be like way back in the day before it broke down and i honestly wish that they did this more often in this series that we had the chance to see more of these dilapidated puzzles because especially when we're dealing with these complicated machines that were built hundreds and hundreds of years ago sometimes thousands of years ago it would only make sense that some of these vague puzzles would break down over time it's pretty ridiculous that they would all be in contact perfectly functioning millennia later as we saw in the first three uncharted games seriously just think about it what are the odds that every single gigantic stone door that has some vague and obscure locking mechanism would work hundreds or thousands of years after the fact i understand why they always work for sake of the story because it would cause a lot of pacing issues if nate and sam got all the way to this final chamber and then the door was broken and they couldn't get in but i think it's important to note that this doesn't make any damn sense and you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit to get through this my other issue with this gigantic cavern is that it opens directly to the sea below it might have been completely enclosed hundreds of years before when this was initially built but over time it's worn down and now it's open to the elements this explains why it collapsed and why the puzzle is no longer standing but it introduces a fleet of new issues narratively speaking most important among them is how has wraith not come across this supposedly he's been searching this area for close to two decades searching every nook and cranny of the cathedral of the surrounding land trying to find this cavern and now he's brought in nadine who has dozens upon dozens possibly hundreds or even thousands of men in her employ that are mercenaries traveling this land in boats cars ships helicopters etc following her orders to find this very place are you seriously suggesting that after all this time these 20 years and nadine's active efforts they haven't taken a boat along the coast to see if there's any caverns peeking through nobody grabbed a drone and flew in to see this i i don't buy that and in what is once again another bizarre coincidence that of course is highly construed once nate and sam enter the next room selecting a coin to open up a projection of madagascar on the floor that they stand on nadine and her men blow their way into the chamber at the exactly correct time to interrupt their conversation in the optimal way nate and sam trick her into having a guard grab the crucifix off the pedestal which is actually a trap which causes the man who grabbed it to fall down to his death nadine narrowly escapes grabbing onto a ledge and escaping out the hole that she came in as the entire chamber slowly collapses as a result of the crucifix being selected everything begins to fall apart you climb up this pillar as it's falling apart swinging in the air freely and i gotta say this sequence is actually pretty memorable and well executed considering how tough it must have been to get this working the next 10 minutes are a flurry of shooting galleries and arenas as you fight through waves of her men eventually you fight your way through all of the hordes and slide down a rock face to sully waiting in the plane down below you climb in as the gunshot rings off but you're able to take off without issue once in the plane the group discusses what they've discovered and what all of this could mean the crew agrees that they need to go to madagascar and that's their next destination nate says that the cross that they found was an invitation but the cave was actually an initiation of sorts to test the real motivations of the people that came to eventually join avery's crew sully properly asks why henry would have gone through so much effort to try and weed out the unworthy and nate says it was probably just to protect himself after all avery was the most wanted man in the world at that time so he needed to make sure the only people that got to him were those that were actually deserving in effect he wanted to filter out the authorities and those who were simply looking for a quick buck he wanted the true pirates the people that actually understood how henry operated and why his goals were in a twisted way noble nate also thinks that avery probably sent these crosses to wealthy pirates and that they all pooled their wealth together in a new land that they would all rule together free from the governance of world powers this of course is known as libertalia the home of the pirates that they founded for themselves and this also means that in libertalia if found they wouldn't just be looking at henry avery's treasure but the treasure of all of the pirate lords combined potentially billions upon billions of dollars worth of gold and artifacts solely now adequately excited asks where to and nate brings up the coin that they took off of the altar in place of the crucifix on the back of it is the volcano that's next to king's bay the crew excitedly heads off from madagascar and we cut to elena calling nate remember she still doesn't know what's going on but has an inkling that something's off she asks nate if he's okay as there's a bunch of flooding in malaysia where he allegedly is and they continues to bs saying that he is okay but because of the monsoon and the fact that it's monsoon season all of the work that they're doing has been postponed roughly 10 days elena immediately goes to book a flight to go out there and join him but nate obviously not okay with this since he's not actually in malaysia insists that he doesn't need her to do that that she should stay behind continue to do her work because they're probably just overestimating the time at the end of the day this moment is very well executed in terms of the animation graphically and just the performances of the actors elena is trying to be supportive but she can't help but feel as though nate is lying to her about something and knowing her and how well she knows nate she probably has a hunch that he's off to his old shenanigans again that there is no malaysia job and he's not actually trying to follow jameson's guide when he says he has to get off the phone her face in this last shot is just heartbreaking and you can tell she's trying to figure out what to do don't worry she is going to come and smack some sense into nate very shortly we then cut to the crew in madagascar nate sam and sully have rented a jeep with a winch on it and we're going to start going through some of the more open levels that the game has to offer the goal is pretty simple we have to push on to the volcano get up there and look for some sort of clue that henry avery left behind we don't know what form these clues will take but we're hoping something will be left behind now that we've reached madagascar i feel as though i can adequately discuss just how bloated a lot of this game feels this segment of the game constitutes my least favorite portion of everything that uncharted 4 has to offer i find the shooting arenas to be boring i find the ever refreshing waves of enemies uninspired and flat out uninteresting and to put it simply it comes off as far too familiar to the desert sequences in uncharted 2 than i would consider to be appropriate for a next generation title compared to the last one the levels have some verticality to them but effectively they're all small arenas that require you to shoot a bunch of enemies before progressing and they repeat this time and time again the goal for sam nate and sully is very straightforward reach the volcano try to discover some points of interest and discover some long lost clues to the henry avery treasure simply they just have to drive to the mountain but naughty dog needed to turn this into a two to three hour sequence filled with all sorts of mindless puzzles tearing down bridges and wide open spaces that are initially beautiful to look at but inevitably require constant double backs to find the route that you're supposed to travel on it seems to me that this sequence was the proof of concept for what would eventually be the seattle sequence in the last of us part 2 where you have the entire map of downtown seattle open to you to explore it took naughty dog years of experimentation to get to the point where they felt comfortable implementing that into one of their main games even in the lost legacy which we'll be discussing in an upcoming critique they were fairly insecure about the wide open spaces what i can say is that these expansive areas while beautiful definitely improved as they experimented more and more with their design it turns out it's not that easy to design a large open space for the player to navigate and to do so in a way where it's clear where the player needs to go next you see in the last of us part 2 those large open areas in seattle were available to the player to go through in any order in which they pleased you could start at the bank go to the courthouse it didn't matter but on uncharted 4 you have to continue along a set path as is standard for most naughty dog games but they want you to feel as though it's your idea and that you are freely traveling about the base of this volcano but as i mentioned earlier i've played this game through a few times so it's hard for me to maintain an air of skepticism and a balanced view on this because i am familiar with this map and this part of the game it's not new to me i know what i'm looking for and i know where i need to go so every time i engage with this now it feels extremely tedious but that being said i would still insist that even for a new player going through this the first time it would feel remarkably unguided and confusing naughty dog eventually figured it out but this was definitely a crash course for them now i could go through each of these combat encounters in all of the arenas but i think it would be remarkably drawn out so instead i'll just hit the highlights for one there's the introduction of this winch on the front of the jeep that you're driving it's actually a pretty cool mechanic allows you to pull down bridges doors trees and eventually you can even use it to climb and winch your way up this muddy ramp to get back up to the road but when you do so you actually pull the boulder out of place that was sitting on the muddy road and you slide over the cliff being held up only by the winch what follows is actually one of the more memorable moments of the game for me i don't know why this stood out to me and why i remember this so clearly but the first time i played this game falling off this cliff was a total system shock to me and ever so carefully driving back up the cliff with the winch holding on for dear life it stuck in my mind and at the end of the day that's kind of the point of these cinematic moments if they aren't memorable interesting and even stress inducing there's no purpose to them they're just filler that's expensive to produce but this sequence though fairly simple just a rocks lighting and a car going over a cliff it's very memorable and i gotta give him credit for that there's also a few discussions that nate and sully share with sam about hector alcazar and everything that went on in the prison while sam was incarcerated they don't ask sam any hard-hitting questions or really interrogate him about his time in the prison rather deciding to leave that unspoken because they're sure it was a difficult time for him and some things just don't need explaining and yet i'm over here calling bs on that because i think it is very reasonable to question sam especially because anybody who looks at this guy is going to get a hint that he's probably being deceptive at least he's withholding some of the truth maybe he does just come off as a sleazeball maybe i just don't trust people that look like sam but i can't help but feel as though he comes off scummy and i admit it's not scientific in the least but i asked all of my friends my wife and practically everybody else i could get a hold of whether or not they trusted sam when they first met him in uncharted 4 and every single one of them said no i was expecting him to betray nate or for it to be revealed that he was a doppelganger or something of the sort if sam wasn't meant to be scummy and sleazy this is a huge issue and a major failing on the part of the director and troy baker in his performance to play a character who the director and writers mean to be honest and direct and have him come off as a sleazeball used car salesman is pretty far from the mark and that's a big issue especially when you're dealing with a relationship as intense and emotional as an older brother with his younger brother and on the flip side if they intended for sam to be a sleazeball and come off in this way which i think is more likely than not i can't help but feel as though the dialogue doesn't reflect what nate and certainly sully perhaps especially sully should be feeling at this point zoli's incredibly streetwise sam's story doesn't really add up and it's strange that even in this moment when they're driving through an expansive madagascar field that he doesn't even think to ask a few basic questions all of that said sam says some basic crap about having read a lot while he was in prison apparently he was able to get books from a guard that was sneaking stuff in for him but eventually the guard was caught and he never saw him again other than that not much happens you push her way up to a tower that's been abandoned for a long time about halfway up the volcano inside the crew finds out that they need to go to other towers elsewhere on the island and after they deal with an ambush filled with a bunch of shoreline men who somehow knew to come to this particular area you decide to split up the crew uses the coin that they got back in scotland to determine that it's one of two towers on the island but they can't be sure since the coin has worn down so it's unclear if it's a trident or a scale of justice or whatever you would call this so sam goes to one and nate and sully head to the other we now begin what i lovingly call the e3 section and i do that not because i'm extremely clever or anything it's just that they showed this section at e3 back in like 2015 2016 whatever it was i don't know at the time this was really groundbreaking tons of npcs that all have individual models clothes attitudes animations poses you name it they have it the attention to detail is off the charts not to mention graphically it's extremely impressive as you walk through this shop and the hundreds of patrons scattered throughout and the dynamic animation set as nate squeezes around characters i remember was just absolutely shocking at the time let's not forget that it's easy to look back on these games and lose appreciation for what they achieved because we're so used to it now but the only reason we're used to it is because these guys were pioneers who did it first and did it fantastically well all of the little details that we've been commenting on throughout the course of this video such as that bar bending under nathan drake's weight or his hands rubbing up against walls when he runs next to them all were small touches that the artists and developers put in here even though they didn't have to the game would in large part be exactly the same if they didn't take this extra step to add this attention to detail to add the dynamic sensors for when nate's character model is close to a wall and then have an animation trigger where he raises his hand to the wall to brace himself it's fantastic and this is what makes naughty dog stand out against the rest this is why everybody says that naughty dog games make it look like everyone else isn't even trying and trust me there's a whole lot more it's one of the reasons i love playing back through these games every time you think you've seen everything it has to offer you'll play through it again and notice tons more touches and little details that you hadn't considered before but at this point i'm rambling and yeah i know insert joke about that's just how my videos are i i know they're just kind of like monetized ramblings at this point but anyway [Laughter] after pushing their way through the crowds in the market nate and sully find their way into the large clock tower that is at the market's precipice inside we have one of the more interesting free climbing and puzzle sections that the game has to offer it mixes free climbing with these puzzles because you have to climb certain things in certain ways and time it properly in order to avoid falling or having it reset climbing these gears also stands out in my memory as one of the more interesting gameplay experiences i had had at that time in 2016. once you get up into the inner workings of the clock tower you'll notice that there are a bunch of bells that you have to ring this has to be done in a particular order though i feel i should mention that if you knock out the scorpion first for example you don't need to repeat the scorpion if you happen to get the second one wrong it simply won't work and then you'll have to continue exploring to find which one you need to ring this is yet another example of the game not presenting a difficult puzzle but rather a tedious one this isn't difficult to figure out it's just a matter of how much time it takes you to figure out how to get up to the next bell that actually has to be wrong in that order once you've rung all four bells the floor rearranges and appears to present the logo or symbol of henry avery and the pirates telling you that you are absolutely in the right place somehow nate knows that he still has to ring the gigantic bell at the very top of the tower in order to progress so he continues making his way up and there's actually a really interesting moment here where you're at the top of the clock tower and you have to climb outside while extremely high in the air overlooking the entire island and you have to climb across the clock face with the different hands of the clock providing the hand holds and what's interesting is once you get on the minute hand it actually swings under your weight so you effectively have one chance at this furthermore they aren't arranged in the ideal position when you first climb out the window so you have to go back in climb the gears which reset the clock hands to the correct position for you to be able to climb on them to get across this is what i mean when i point out that the free running in this game is so much more creatively implemented than the previous games systems were those systems effectively constituted nothing more than getting from point a to point b allowing the player to engage with a cutscene or some other moment that was triggered by the arrival at that location free climbing was nothing more than a means to an end whereas in uncharted 4 the free running is in and of itself in end but setting that aside once you're at the top of the clock tower you try to ring it with the same mechanism that you did the other ones but it snaps off almost hitting slowly on the ground below so you jump onto the bell to ring it manually but it detaches when you do so and pretty soon the entire clock begins to collapse under its own weight the bell falls all the way to the bottom smashing open the floor and revealing the access to the hidden passageway underneath nate and sully have to remove some rubble to open up the path again but it's not a big deal because the characters can do this when it's convenient for the writers and they can't when it's not convenient but i'll just leave it there you know what no games do this all the time and naughty dog especially does it in these uncharted games where a pathway is blocked arbitrarily and the characters decide they can't climb over it can't go around it and can't clear it by hand until they can in an instance like this where they suddenly gain the ability to move a small log out of the way i'm sorry but it's always bugged me that these games do this where clearly there's a fence that they could climb over or squeeze through but they don't because the writers don't want them to i'll stop ranting about it now because it's beside the point and it's just an artifact of video games being well video games so i'll just shut up in the guts of the clock tower we find a basic puzzle that presents a few symbols with some different signs along the edges and they have to be arranged and rotated so that they line up properly it's simple enough and as the tiles get swapped out they'll have new symbols assigned to them based on the paintings that are revealed inside each of these chambers that open up once you solve each aforementioned puzzle by the end of this puzzle nate will have to keep track of these symbols in his notebook and he'll even tear out little squares for these puzzles so you can solve it in your notebook before going to the actual puzzle box to do it i can't express enough how much i love this i think it's so cool and i wish they had found more ways to make nate's notebook useful the notebook has tons of interesting little tidbits small quirks and even artwork that he's drawn there's so much good stuff in there but unfortunately i don't think many players will spend the time that they should sifting through it and enjoying all of the little details maybe more puzzles like this that nate has to conceptually solve within the notebook and then translate it into the actual puzzle box or maybe just puzzles that have to be answered correctly on their first go so he has to make sure he has it solved in his notebook before experimenting on the actual puzzle system and mechanism itself i'm sure there's many ways they could do this but i just wanted to point out that i loved that they were able to implement this little system into this large puzzle that everybody will have to solve in order to progress as you work your way through the puzzle you'll also call sam occasionally to ask him questions about different pirates you send him pictures of the people on the walls the locations and even text him information that tells him what you're seeing and what it could possibly mean this initially seems innocuous enough but it will come back to bite them in just a second after you solve the last puzzle on the puzzle box it rotates and reveals three separate discs that have an impression on them so nate pulls out his camera takes some pictures of them to send them to sam and then records them in his notebook he takes the pieces of paper and holds them up against the light on the wall which happens to be lit very conveniently and discovers the actual location for what they assume is libertalia once they discover this nate becomes very excited as does sully he's very intrigued but nate gets a phone call and when he picks it up it's not sam it's rafe turns out he somehow paid somebody off to hack nate's phone and has been receiving all of the text messages that he's been sending to sam along with all of the pictures meaning that he has all of the same information nate does but hasn't had to do any of the work i could go on a diatribe about how this doesn't make any damn sense and how he probably couldn't just hack into somebody's cell phone but i think there's a more reasonable explanation for how he got these text messages i will save that for later though i know i keep saying that but i don't want to spoil things in case you haven't played this game before so for now just know that rafe has been getting all of the text messages that have been going to sam and that sam has been sending to nate it hangs up on rafe but immediately realizes that sam will also be in danger soon because rafe knows exactly where they are so he commands sam to destroy his phone and then throws his down to smash it destroying it small correction i guess i should clarify it's not clear if he's hacking sam's phone nate's phone and sully's phone the phone that nate answers is actually sully's but it's unclear what exactly rafe is doing to get access to all of their inter-party communications again i think i have an answer for this later but we'll save it sam is immediately attacked with gunfire at the lower tower and so nate and sully know they have very little time to get to him so the two race out of the plaza down the hill and into the market and once they reach the base of the stairs a bunch of gunshots are rained out and all of the locals run and hide all of a sudden this vibrant marketplace is empty and has turned itself into another shooting arena but just when it seems like another boring bland arena for you to fight through though featuring some interesting shooting mechanics such as hiding behind these bags of beans they actually get drained with gunshots it's a cool touch that i didn't actually appreciate when the game first came out but i will say it's very impressive to see this type of thing even nowadays with cover destruction actually implemented in real time so i think it absolutely deserves praise considering this released in 2016 which as bizarre as it is to say was five years ago or six years ago if you're watching this in 2022 which is far more likely and for those of you watching this in 2023 or 2024 hi what's it like what's going on i don't let me know i'm interested but at the end of the market a gigantic armored truck bursts onto the scene and begins to open fire you run through a couple of buildings to try and avoid its fire eventually getting on top of a small marketplace shop to jump into the jeep that's parked in the lot just above the market and so begins yet another e3 sequence this was shown off so it wasn't a surprise to anybody when the game launched but it also features one of the most wide open environments that naughty dog ever created they actually did create this entire town and they do allow the player to navigate it freely though it's important to note this is effectively just a gigantic ski hill there's a few basic routes that you can take but at the end of the day you're still going down the same hill what's really impressive though is all of the destruction and physics that are implemented here such as catching clothes on clothes lines on the car that drag realistically behind you smashing through fences bumping into cars smashing crates and different carts for local street vendors and even once you get down to this bazaar along this street that's filled with baskets and carts full of fruit not a single frame drops and it performs fantastically well throughout granted i don't have a base launch day ps4 to test this on but my ps4 slim that i played this on back in 2016 which was brand new at the time did hold up remarkably well and didn't drop a single frame itself though to be fair i'm sure it was rendering at a severely reduced resolution yet another instance of naughty dog being able to absolutely perfectly refine the gameplay experience for the player they have zero tolerance for major frame drops for bugs for hitches and moments that would totally tear the player out of immersion you really have to hand it to them even if you don't appreciate their narratives or the way that they tend to design their games or even their culture within the studio they do very good work and they are certainly perfectionists once at the bottom of the hill nate and sully see sam riding and trying to escape a gigantic brigade of mercenaries that are chasing him he's on a rinky dinky motorcycle trying to get away from them as they openly fire at him with machine guns again i'll just point out this is a little ridiculous that after a 5 or 10 minute shootout he wouldn't get so much as a scratch while riding a motorcycle but once again this is just something you have to accept in order for these action games to be fun at all if they were realistic almost nothing would happen in the entire story eventually the crew reaches the river which opens up to a bridge and the road runs out so nate throws his grapple hook onto the truck that's chasing sam and swings holding on for dear life behind the truck as he slides through the mud and grime and dirt and through chickens it's pretty insane and i gotta just say this was wildly impressive in 2016 when it was shown off at e3 and it is still wildly impressive today if any game did this that launched at any point in the next few years i think this would still be wildly impressive the fact that they have the ever-changing environment the constantly changing platforms as you move from truck to car to motorcycle what have you and the fact that it does all of this without so much as dropping a few frames it is fantastically impressive granted naughty dog had a lot of experience with this even going back to the train sequence in uncharted 2 but that's exactly why this runs so well they've done this before and they figured it out you try to hold off the mercenaries for as long as you can eventually taking over a car and getting up next to sam the two disagree on which one should jump on to who's vehicle and they do this just too long to the point where nate is t-boned by the truck that was just chasing us through the city and all of those little bazaars the car flips and lights on fire so nate slowly climbs his way out and jumps onto sam's motorcycle sam then hands nade a gun which is some sort of fully automatic handheld mini machine gun i can't really tell what it's supposed to be looking at it it looks like just a fully automatic pistol of some sort but he opens fire on the truck as it chases you through this dock area you unload with unlimited ammo on this thing though it stands to reason that it doesn't actually matter how accurate you are because you're actually just headed to a set destination at the end of the dock you have to continue dealing damage otherwise you'll enter a fail state but so long as you do this there's no actual threat to the player even though it feels as though you're in severe and serious danger eventually the car flips explodes and sam and nate drive off into the sunset safe having escaped what could only be assumed as imminent death the crew heads back to the motel and as nate walks into the room claiming the treasure is as good as theirs he pauses and he sees that elena is in the room looking at the notes that the gang has collected she sadly asks how the malaysia job is going they insist it isn't what it looks like but it is elena being able to read nate like a book says it looks an awful lot like they're searching for avery's treasure and giving all of the shoreline soldiers all throughout the island looks like they aren't the only ones looking for it either nate admits it kind of is what it looks like but he says that he can explain but it will certainly sound crazy and elena says try me but uh well it sounds pretty crazy because at this point he still hasn't even explained to her that he has a brother i'll just let the following little bit play out because i can't do it justice so here you go this is sam sam drake my brother hi i'm sorry i i thought he had died in a panamanian jail but i was obviously very wrong he's been stuck in there for 15 years and it's because of me and the guy who broke him out wants a lot of money and the only way we can pay off the debt is avery's treasure but that's the good news we found it it's it's on an island just off the coast stop was there ever a malaysia job okay come on wait elena wait i don't get you okay i i wanted to tell you you know what enough no i wanted to but how could i i don't know just say it i had to protect you that is [ __ ] nate you just didn't have the nerve to face me again i knew you would react like this how would you react you lied to me for weeks if you were killed i i wouldn't have even known about it [Music] and now you have a brother who are you come on i'm me come on it's me it's different this time i have to save him i don't even care about the treasure many details the look on your face when you walked into this room if you're done lying to me then you should stop lying to yourself i got a plane to catch you do what you have to do [Music] hey hey what are you doing go after her we're not done here well maybe we should be what are you saying i'm saying maybe there's a smarter way to save sam such as such as we give him a new identity we we put him in hiding somewhere right he's been in prison for 15 years he's not going into hiding okay fine you go after your wife sam and i will head off for libertalia without me come on you'll get both of you killed really kid i've been doing this for a hell of a long time i think i might be able to help you want to be helpful sullivan go keep an eye on her saying sullivan instead of sully whatever you say [Music] you need a hand got it just pack your bags go take a bath now this whole scene raises a lot of interesting questions both about nate's relationship with sam nate's relationship with elena and sully's relationship with all of them sully really genuinely cares about nate and elena and i think he's starting to realize that he can't trust sam or more specifically he's starting to realize that sam isn't actually considering what's best for nate he just wants his little brother to come along with him to help him find the big bad treasure nate is also very very conflicted he does love elena but he loves his brother too and at this point he almost feels as though he's too deep into this and if elena doesn't support him in this pursuit that she's not supporting the real him elena feels justifiably betrayed and as though she's been lied to for weeks which she has but at the center of all of this the core problem is that nate doesn't actually know what he wants or who he is sam and elena represent the two halves of his being sam represents the part of him that is adventure loving dangerous risky really irresponsible if we're being honest and who loves adventuring and searching for treasure elena represents stability safeness life and love and happiness and long-term success she represents everything nate wants to be about and to cherish but that he just can't bring himself to embrace and commit to and i think this relationship between nate and elena and nate and sam is actually really interesting but i think it's brought down by the relationship that's already been established off screen between nate and elena and that is that they're married we don't get to see the engagement we don't get to see the marriage we just jump into this in the fourth game with them having already made that huge step together this type of dispute seems really weird for them to be having at this point in their lives after having gone through the engagement and the marriage it seems as though this whole plot point would have been better suited if it took place perhaps during their engagement or if the events of uncharted 4 happened while they were still separate but dating and active with each other and elena for instance really wanted to get engaged and nate wanted to get engaged and commit to her but he was torn between that commitment and the return of his long-lost brother sam i think it would have added a lot more stakes to the entire dynamic between them when a couple is married there's a huge barrier between where they currently are and the total collapse of the relationship because they have the marriage set up so to get all the way to the point where they would accept that their relationship doesn't work or that they just can't come to terms with how different the other is whereas if they were still dating and nate hadn't fully committed to her yet the stakes would be really high if he screws this up too bad he might lose her forever and i understand that you could say the same thing even now with them being married but i think it's different but i do admit that this is largely most likely a result of my upbringing and my opinion and outlook when it comes to marriage and that commitment all of this to say nate don screwed up his wife is livid with him rightfully so and he refused to go to her comforting her and apologizing effectively saying that they need a break to figure out what they're actually about sam tries to be the supportive big brother who constantly pushes his brother into let's be honest terrible situations that allow him to vicariously live through his little brother and sully has made his disapproval very very clear so determined to continue nate turns to sam and tells him to pack his bags they're gonna head to libertalia and find the treasure shutting this down once and for all we then cut to nate and sam driving the same boat that we saw in the prologue giving us a nod to what's going to happen in the coming moments but for now the skies are clear mostly and you're driving towards an island one that you hope to possess libertalia nate is still clearly dejected after what happened with elena and sully but sam is trying to keep his spirits up and get him excited for the treasure that he's sure they're about to find the two share a beer cheer sick parvis magna and sam tells nate that elena will surely get over it when they bring back all of those treasures and riches nate though knowing elena very very well isn't so confident that a little bit of treasure is going to tide things over he's worried that he's done this just one too many times and this might have been the last nail in the coffin over the next 20 to 30 minutes you're going to be exploring this island climbing up various towers and trying to locate clues that will point you in the general direction of avery's treasure or at the very least of the city that he founded i wish i could say that this offers the player the chance to engage with some fantastically creative puzzles that break up the monotony of the game but no we actually just turn a dial with a big arrow on it when we're at the top of a tower and then we can see all of these little circular targets pop up across the island under the water surrounding the island leading us on a hansel and gretel breadcrumb trail path to where avery wants us to go i get it it's a video game but this just makes absolutely no sense why would henry avery go to all this trouble to put up these mechanical circles that pull out of the water or out of the land itself pointing you in all different directions eventually leading you to the place he wants you to go instead of just directly pointing to where he wants you to go you can even see the general area you're supposed to head to from this same vantage point this is purely to pad gameplay time and it doesn't even make sense in the world regardless you hop in the boat and you follow these signs around the island taking in the sights and eventually coming into a cave where you climb up a large pillar in the center and come out on the other side within a large cavernous opening there's some old architecture and it's clear it's been abandoned for a long time but you're on the right track the two start exploring looking for a way in since all the bridges and landings have collapsed many many years before eventually with nate hoisting sam up onto a larger platform so that he can look for an area to climb up first but when he's crossing the drawn bridge the rope snaps and sam barely makes it across the other side the player and nate not being able to see what he's doing become worried as to what's happened to sam we don't hear from him nate starts yelling for him and nate becomes convinced that his brother's gone missing it's a really small moment but it's one that shows just how lonely and insecure nate feels at this given moment in effect nate gave up elena for his brother and this treasure at least that's what he thinks he's done at this point so to lose his brother now well it's just another example of how terrible his luck is but in a reconnection that will surprise absolutely no one turns out nate was just overreacting and sam was inside the building looking for something that nate could climb on once they're rejoined the two continue pressing on climbing up cliff sides swinging across large expanses and eventually coming into some very ancient architecture that looks as though it's been sitting there unused and abandoned for centuries upon centuries inside there's a puzzle that you can complete it's actually one of the more memorable puzzles in the entire game at least as far as i'm concerned where you have to line up these shafts of light onto these orbs that you rotate around the room it still falls victim to the sickness that infects all of the puzzles in this game and that is that it's not particularly difficult it's just tedious once you know what you have to do it's not about figuring it out anymore it's just about tediously going through rotating the orbs at just the right position so that they line up correctly when they're placed in their proper positions and that initial step of figuring out what you need to do is basically spoon fed to the player because the characters say as much once the puzzle is solved you go on a platform and it raises up to the top of the island and in the distance you can see a statue in the same location that you were before raising out of the ground with the telescope in hand looking off into the distance it's a gigantic statue of henry avery and he's constructed it to hopefully direct you in what we can only pray is the final location of libertalia the two get back to the boat head back to the original location they were just in climb up onto the statue and look through the telescope in the distance they can see an island that the telescope has in its sight with the assumption that that big island is where libertalia will be with their newfound destination the two head back to the boat and then the cut scene from the beginning of the game plays out with the boat crashing being marooned on the island and sam and nate being separated we see a very injured and cold nate wash up on the shore of the island again alone completely isolated nate is clearly injured because he's walking with a limp and any time you try to do anything as you explore this level you're going to be reminded of it because his movement is extremely slow and he slips constantly while climbing which is also a result of the rain but still nate tries to push on eventually trying to climb straight up what is in effect a waterfall and slipping on the handles as the water cascades down his face and the grip holds honestly i'm surprised these uncharted games haven't done this more frequently the last was part 2 did it all of the time with mundane traversal such as this being interrupted with bombastic sometimes literally events that shook you to your core making you feel as though you were never safe okay let's look for an open building preferably with no infected or wlf [Music] i just think it's very important that games try to subvert expectations in this way when you feel secure enough in a basic gameplay mechanism it tears you out of the immersion especially when the writers are trying to make you feel isolated or in danger or injured in some significant way in this case nate is extremely hurt he shouldn't be climbing up cliff faces and he shouldn't be trying to navigate this island alone but he's still doing it however because we know that if you're climbing up a cliff face and you have the hand grips you are going to make it there's no real danger here so the player feels just as secure swinging and jumping and leaping every which way as they would if he was fully healed and perfectly fine adding in these scripted sequences where nate is scripted into falling is actually a great thing in my view it makes sure that the player can never take for granted these gameplay mechanisms just because they've engaged with them for hours and hours on end i can understand that some people would find something like this to be a little subversive or even unfair and i guess to a certain extent that would be correct it is unfair because you didn't see it coming and you couldn't have prevented it however life's not fair and trying to climb up a cliff face with a broken hand or some other injury of the sword isn't fair either you're gonna lose and that should also be reflected in the gameplay the only other thing i'll say about subverting expectations in this way with scripted events is that sometimes it can be overdone as well when you're constantly subverting expectations and introducing these scripted sequences to introduce some level of fear in the player or concern that they might not actually be okay the last thing i'll say about this is that sometimes it can be overdone which is what we start to see in some of the later sections of this chapter of the game nate starts having these scripted slips so frequently that it actually causes the player to grow numb to it they're no longer concerned that he's about to fall to his death because the novelty is worn off in those last of us part 2 clips that we just played there was actual danger involved if you screwed up you were dead and you would have to reload and the character in turn was dead in effect you failed however when it's purely a scripted sequence and all that happens is that the player character slips a few hand holds and then still grabs on it's not actually introducing greater danger or higher stakes to the situation it's just effectively repositioning the character into a new spot with some flashy animations this of course can be quickly addressed with a couple of quick time events to make sure that the player is paying attention and if they actually do fail the quicktime event to grab onto the handhold then the player character falls all the way to their death it would be really easy to do this and not a dog does it occasionally but not in this chapter regardless nate pushes on eventually ending up in the heartland of the island and it's at this point that we're introduced to the climbing pick which is the last major gameplay element that will be introduced before the game's credits roll it's not bad it's actually really fun being able to leap from great distances and just sliding down with this pick carefully and ever so slightly digging into the wall it's pretty satisfying but unfortunately it only has an effect on these special spongy surfaces it can't actually be used on any rock surface or any wood surface or building that you might come across which is what i was hoping when i first played this game i mean just think of the level of exploration and verticality that would be introduced if you could use this climbing pick on any wooden surface any side of a building anything at all it would be so cool but unfortunately we don't get it it's just a tacked-on feature and tool that they add to the basic free climbing system that's already here my assumption would be that they developed this towards the end of development primarily because they realized that the free climbing was growing a little bit stale and stagnant most likely they developed a prototype for this but didn't implement it into the core game because they felt it didn't add enough and then towards the end of development realized that they needed a little bit more so they pulled it back out of the drawer granted i have no evidence at all for this suspicion but it just makes sense in my view the system is nowhere near fleshed out enough to feel as though it was something that they fully intended to use in the beginning of the game's development and it's not implemented in the broader scope of the game which makes me think it was something that they focused on later on in development but it's sort of beside the point over the next hour or so there's going to be a lot of arenas these are just jungle areas that you can stealth or fight your way through filled with all sorts of nadine's henchmen these shoreline guys have already made it to the island fully populated it and started exploring they're not just standing here looking around or searching for libertalia these guys are standing in very precarious places with guns drawn walking back and forth looking for someone or something i get it they were probably told to be on the lookout for baddies trying to swoop in and steal the treasure but it just doesn't make a lot of sense why they're all so aggressively hyperactive i mean at the very least let them be slacking off sitting around doing nothing until you make a sound or do something to alert them it just doesn't make sense why they would be so attentive from the beginning 100 of the time again this is something that the last of us part 2 greatly improves upon the npc placement feels much more fair in that game characters slack off aren't paying attention in given moments and only become hyper alert when you do something that ushers that behavior on and i don't mean to keep pointing to the last of us part 2 as some sort of great trump card see well you should just stop playing uncharted you should go play those games that's not what i'm saying i'm merely pointing out that these are issues that even naughty dog identified and corrected in their subsequent releases but back to the game nate fights his way through waves and waves of these enemies through countless jungle arenas trying to find sam he's previously spotted him in the distance thanks to a reflecting mirror so he knows he's alive and well he just has to get to him they share some dialogue and nate seems to have come to his senses he recognizes that they're going up against an army especially after the last few fighting arenas which were extremely stacked against you the enemies had sniper rifles machine guns rpgs countless grenades and seemingly endless reinforcements there's nothing that they can't throw at these brothers they are literally two guys against an army nate's dejected and wants to give up go back home and try to salvage what's left of his relationship with elena but sam insists that they're so close they can't give up yet and in what is probably the most staged event in any of the uncharted games in the middle of this argument where nate wants to give up and move on he looks over sam's shoulder and sees something behind him he moves the vines aside and behold it is the sigil of henry avery yeah in the middle of this argument in the middle of a gigantic overgrown jungle they just happen to find one of the key markers of libertalia which reignites the flame innate and makes him realize they're so close they can't possibly give up having completely forgotten about his concerns nate pushes on with sam and they start to explore the ruins of what seems to be a 16th or 17th century city most of the buildings have collapsed but it's clear this is a city or at the very least remnants of it eventually the two find this crate they climb up it and out the window that's above it looking forward they see it libertalia and i gotta say this is a fantastically well realized city it is very well constructed feels like an actual place that you could live and explore it's very very well done i will say it because i'm a nitpicky jerk this falls prey to the same exact ill that every other uncharted game to this point has had when it comes to the magical land or city or treasure that you're hunting it's in some isolated far-off land but once you get there it's open to the elements for anybody to see with a plane or a helicopter short of arguing that straight-up magic is what's been hiding it all this time there's very little excuse why this wouldn't have been found especially because the buildings that are still standing are so massive and intact i get it some people might say that the leaf overgrowth would make it look like it's just a forest from the air or something of the sort but i just don't buy it when it comes to libertalia literally anyone with google earth or a pair of binoculars on a commercial airliner flying in this general area would be able to see this like for real look at that it does however explain why shoreline has been able to arrive so much quicker and completely populate the island and every square inch of it since their arrival they figured libertalia must be somewhere in these islands they probably took a plane overhead saw this massive city and landed all of their men in here with helicopters and ships brought straight to shore makes sense definitely a better way of doing it nate and sam have to fight their way through the city however because they can never take just two minutes to enjoy themselves props to the level designers though this is actually one of the more interesting arena set pieces that they have in the entirety of uncharted 4. it's large there's tons of cover different angles for enemies to shoot you from and for you to shoot them from lots of tall grass for you to hide behind and even a lot of these large open areas that you can swing across to get to new vantage points and they managed to pull all of this out in terms of gameplay while also having constructed a city that feels believable and as though it's actually collapsing around you it's really really well done eventually you get past all of the mercenaries and walk up to what looks to be some sort of court or magistrate building outside there are countless corpses with big barricades made out of furniture and bodies strewn throughout it looks like the colonists were trying to raid the treasury and that they met head-to-head with the soldiers that avery had hired to protect it we don't know details but it seems as though this pirate paradise wasn't all it was cracked up to be and it looks as though there could have been a very good reason why all of these people tried to get their money back and when you push into the treasury your worst fears are confirmed it looks as though the treasury was emptied many many centuries ago likely by the very pirates that established this city which is why the colonists tried to raid it they found out their money had been taken and outraged tried to get it back themselves only to be killed in the line of fire while trying to break into the treasury building itself but not giving up hope just yet nate and sam look around to try and gather clues there's a bunch of stuff such as on the walls all the paintings of the pirate captains that you followed to get here are written words like thief which one can only assume was done by the angered colonists put two and two together it seems very reasonable to suspect that these are the very same captains who likely stole the treasure for themselves out from under the noses of the colonists so you decide you need to push up to the neighborhood where these pirate captains lived themselves because if they stole the treasure they're either going to have kept the treasure with them or there will be clues to its whereabouts nearby so to get a vantage point you climb to the very tippy top tower of this building and you get what is i think the best view in the entire game in the distance from the crow's nest you can see just on the other side of the river the neighborhood where all of the rich and powerful pirate captains lived with your newfound destination the two begin climbing their way back down the tower and because this is an uncharted game they're attacked this is actually a really cool sequence and one of the most impressive action sequences in the entire game you race down the tower but as you do so you're attacked with rpgs incessant gunfire grenades everything that they could throw at you which slowly starts to tear the building down eventually actually succeeding the whole thing slips and falls under its own weight seriously this makes that whole building collapse sequence and uncharted 2 look like it was developed by toddlers like so much more impressive granted it's on much newer hardware and they could get away with a lot more here but it's just so impressive you gotta give them credit you fight through waves and waves and waves of enemies as towers and buildings collapse around you it's done so well and it doesn't stop for like 15 minutes straight it's just pure escapism entertainment at its finest i love it but all things must come to an end so nadine shows up she proceeds to kick the ever living crap out of nate and sam together for a solid five minutes and i have lots of thoughts on nadine her character her role in the franchise especially in the lost legacy where they tried to set her up as a coming companion or protagonist herself in the franchise i have lots of thoughts i'm not going to get into it too much in this video i've already touched on it a bit so for now i'll just say this doesn't make any sense she was able to hold off nate okay maybe she's some sort of super powered fighter but the fact that she could hold off nate and sam in a life or death situation and fight just doesn't make sense to me i don't get it these guys are two serial killers who are very experienced in hand-to-hand combat i i just don't buy it regardless the trio falls to a platform below and rafe shows up himself gunstron he approaches and sam takes nadine hostage holding a gun to her head he tells rafe that he'll kill nadine if he insists on approaching further but rafe calls his bluff and says that it's just not his style proven right nadine is released and nadine obviously livid that this man just played with her life like it was nothing more than a small bed in vegas she's ticked off for lack of a better word and it's here that we get the big reveal that i've been alluding to for the entire video at this point the big reveal you see sam hasn't been completely honest with you it looks like he also hasn't told rafe exactly what he's told you because rafe seems just as concerned and freaked out at the revelation that hector alcazar is the reason that sam and nate are trying to find the treasure quickly putting two and two together he reveals to nate what actually happened you see rafe is the one that broke sam out of prison because he needed help finding the treasure so he went to the guy that he figured knew it best he discovered somehow that he was still alive and wasn't actually killed in the prison escape and uses his connections to get him out this was apparently two years before this and they've been out searching for the second saint dismiss cross ever since only in the last few months did they decide that they needed nate to get involved as well or rather sam decided that he needed his brother's help to get the treasure so sam showed up saying that he had this deal with some sort of drug lord that got him out of prison in exchange for the treasure otherwise he'd be killed and this actually explains a lot it explains why i think the player should be feeling a little suspicious of sam especially early on he comes out of nowhere for no reason whatsoever and his breakout story doesn't make a lot of sense but this also introduces a lot of other issues as well such as the complete lack of double checking that occurred on the part of sully and elena i get it nate loves his brother and if his brother showed up saying simply i got out of prison and i need your help because some guy's after me he might just take him at his word but sully especially doesn't like sam to begin with we know this from very very early on based on the dialogue between sam and nate discussing sully when they're breaking into the gigantic black market auction all it would take would be a quick google search of the name hector alcazar to realize that he was killed in a shootout any large drug dealer or criminal who's killed in a large shootout would probably make basic news or even a mention in the funnies the idea that sully elena and nate himself never thought to even google the name hector alcazar is just a bit of a far stretch for me maybe i'm too much of a zoomer but i know when somebody tells me the name of somebody i haven't encountered before who's some sort of public figure or criminal or mastermind of some sort or another if i want to learn more about them i'll just google their name so for nate who doesn't know about hector alcazar or known details about him it makes sense that he might google his name to see a picture to know who to be on the lookout for in case he shows up somewhere where they're searching for the treasure but no he apparently never does this he just takes it on blind faith that his brother's being completely honest and he coincidentally doesn't search for any information on alcazar the entire time they're searching for this treasure and what makes it even more frustrating for me is that i think the writers were even aware of these conflicting motivations when they wrote the original dialogue at the rossi estate because if you remember when we went through that earlier sam looks extremely worried the first time he sees sully and i think he's extremely worried because he's really concerned as to whether or not he's looked up his alibi and story or whether or not he was in panama at the time of nate's breakout or even whether or not the prison itself had a massive breakout that included hector alcazar and that explains why the second sully greets him warmly clearly indicating he has no dirt on him at all and that he's just glad to see him sam looks extremely relieved i don't blame him i'd be relieved too obviously this revelation brings up a lot of questions about the true motivations behind sam's actions and nates as well he thought he was helping his brother and he was also searching for the treasure which was a good perk as well but now he realizes he's not actually helping his brother and that his brother is likely just using him to get to the treasure to enrich himself and his newfound business partner rafe but before he has time to fully process it sam seems to have a change of heart he doesn't want to do this anymore he wants to get everything out on the table but nadine still pissed off that she was almost killed for a gag insists that this has to come to an end and when rafe raises his gun to shoot nate once and for all to use sam to just find the treasure himself sam jumps in front and takes the bullet in the shoulder for nate but in the process nate's pushed off the cliff falling presumably to his death but no he just flips around is unconscious at the bottom and somehow elena shows up to find him and nurse him back to health don't ask me why or how this works but it happened we then get to continue the flashback from earlier in the game after nate is broken out of the orphanage by sam to go and head to this mansion that possesses some of the items belonging to nate and sam's late mother the house is beautiful and the crew starts exploring it it seems like it hasn't been lived in for quite some time everything is dusty and piled up along the walls and in front of doors so it's safe to assume that you're alone there's tons of historical artifacts you can find helmets to wear things to interact with and it's just a fantastically realized house i mean i gotta give it to naughty dog their environment artists in these games have just outdone themselves time and time again and this is another example of just fantastic work you can really take your time as you explore the house and take it all in slowly but what's clearly established is that these two are not here to steal things or to just rummage around and cause chaos they're here looking for their mothers journals and items they don't want to steal anything that they don't consider to be their rightful property as the children of the deceased eventually you find an air vent you climb into a locked office room with an adjacent bedroom that has a hospital bed and tons of pills surrounding it it's clear whoever lives in this house is very very ill or perhaps was there's a huge pile of mail by the front door so it's safe to assume if they were ill they might not be ill anymore if you catch my drift inside the office there's a white box underneath a desk and inside is the journal that belonged to nate and sam's mother they start looking through it but soon after a woman holding a revolver tells them to stop very little is revealed to us about this old woman but what is told to us is that she's extremely sick and also that she knew your mother she's a collector of sorts as she puts it and she considered nate and sam's mother to be one of the most brilliant historians she had ever encountered when she realizes who you two are she puts the gun down and apologizes however she's already called the police because of course her house was being broken into there's a little bit of dialogue that they share and she says that you can keep the journals but she tells you to get out the way you came in because the police are here and she'll handle them but of course it probably would be best if these two young rap scallions weren't wandering around the house while she's claiming that she simply misheard some strange noises in the large house and i can't believe i'm about to say this because it's probably the stupidest plot point in any of the uncharted games period and i know i've probably said that about other plot lines too especially in uncharted 3 which had a lot of them but i'm gonna stick to it for now the woman drops dead yeah she just has like a massive heart attack while standing up here she's dead and yeah so now looking like a couple of murderers the two climb out the window of the house and up onto the roof trying to make their escape and what follows is probably the most stilted and awkward escape sequence in any naughty dog game that i can think of seriously the cops are parked just below it's pretty well lit their sirens are blaring and so are the lights and somehow they don't see these two climbing on the building out an open window and onto the roof it it's really weird to me and then in the following sections as more police arrive you actually will drop down into the garden area and you're chased one-on-one by these officers who have guns and tasers and flashlights and still somehow stop right before you get to them and allow you to escape it's the most stilted and awkwardly put together escape sequence in any of these games i'll stand by it i just think it's it's really poorly done i can't stand it and of course the fact that it's set in motion by one of the most contrived plot points in any of these games with this woman randomly dropping dead it's just one of the worst moments in any of these games it's really unfortunate and it's not like this doesn't have large implications because this woman was found dead in her house and you two are the suspected burglars that caused her death you have to go on the run now this is how nate and sam got their start how nathan drake became nathan drake because they literally chose to change their names after this happened this woman's death randomly at this awkward moment is what's set into motion everything we know as uncharted listen i'm not asking for much i'm just asking if you're going to give us the backstory of a character the foundations of who they are don't make it so freaking stupid please regardless sam and nate decide they need to change their names and that they are going to choose the name drake in honor of the great explorer we flash back forward to the present day where we can see elena patching up nate he's been telling her this story giving her the complete truth and background of his life with his brother sam and how they got started on all of this over the next few moments there's some light dialogue exchanged where elena still isn't sure if she can trust nate but she loves him and she's just glad that he's okay they have some stuff to work through but for now they just need to figure out where sam is and get him out of there it looks like elena was brought here by sully on a plane somehow they figured out exactly where the island was that libertalia was located again probably because they had a freaking plane and they could just see it and they decided to drop off elena to go looking for nate in the massive island likely following the large explosions that were being set off while you fought all of the shoreline people and she just happened to stumble on nate's body in the river below and so while things are still tense and awkward you know what you have to do find sam get back to sully and get out of libertalia wraith and his freaking army can have the treasure just so long as everybody gets out alive so we continue to press on through the following levels with elena as our sidekick sharing some awkward dialogue in banter as they try to work through all of the countless lies that nate has levied her way it may not be the most exciting chapter of the game but i think it might be one of the best the next half hour or so isn't about the gameplay per se it's more about nate and elena catching up while doing some light puzzles and navigating to get closer and closer to sam but fundamentally this isn't a section that's meant to push the player with challenging gameplay systems or combat arenas there will be a couple of those towards the end of this chapter but for now it's more about giving the player a break and nate the chance to catch up with elena the two help each other get a couple of old elevators from avery's time working again and they eventually get their hands on a jeep that they can use to navigate greater distances more easily then you combine the two and you get the jeep onto the elevator and lift it up top so you can drive straight up to the front door of the henry avery compound where all of the rich people hung out together right before you take off elena pauses and talks to nate making sure that he understands just because he thought he was protecting her doesn't mean that what he did was right they're supposed to be a team a partnership husband and wife and they should be able to tell each other even the most difficult things because that's what this is all about after all nate acknowledges this and then the two hop in the car and you drive slowly up this long winding road with light music playing and nothing more it's just a calming drive through this meadow that's meant to give the player a chance to think about what's going on and also give nate and elena a small break from being the center of attention but all good things must come to an end you find a bridge leading into the neighborhood but the second that the jeep sets on it it starts to collapse and eventually fully disintegrates underneath the weight of the car dropping you into the waterfall beneath you clunkily bounce along some rocks as you drift closer and closer to the falls and at the last minute are able to winch your way up onto a tree and narrowly escape death even though they just survived a near-death experience and elena helped pull nate off of the cliff nate has something else on his mind and i'll just let this section play out because i think it'll do it better justice than i could just reciting it huh so much for the car come on i wasn't trying to protect you it's just i i made a promise that i was done with this life we both did yeah but i broke it i didn't tell you because i was afraid i'm afraid of what losing you i guess i was myself you know [Music] we have a lot of ground to cover yeah should keep moving yeah having come to this newfound resolution nate and elena are in a good place so you push on up to the avery households but for now it's going to be a lot of navigating through some rough jungle and across some waterfalls and jungly areas yes i just used the word jungley don't at me as you get closer and closer to the rich people's neighborhood eventually you come across a large pile of bodies and then you reach the outside gates which is surrounded by gallows and different areas where they've displayed the bodies of colonists who tried to raid the neighborhood it's clear whatever rebellion went on the pirate captains didn't respond well to it and wanted to quash it and make an example of all of those who rebelled and this is made all the clearer by the signs that are placed beneath the bodies most of them reading dignifactis which in latin translates to quote we receive the do rewards of our deeds it's basically the fancy way of saying ex gon give it to you and if you ask for this you shouldn't be surprised that you got the punishment you did undeterred nate and elena eventually find a way to climb up these gallows and cages into the city which has been aptly named new devon most of the city has at this point flooded and collapsed there's the remnants of huge and luxurious mansions but most of it's underwater at this point in the distance you can see the mansion which you can only assume belong to henry avery himself since it's the largest and most dornate and looking through some binoculars you can see sam rafe and nadine ushering themselves into the palace so you know where you're headed and you'll begin exploring the remnants of this city as you work your way up you do encounter some guards here and you can engage in combat but i think it's more likely that the level designers were intending you to approach these situations much more stealthily especially considering you have elena now thankfully they leave it up to the player so you can engage violently if you want to but i insist i think that the stealth way not only makes more sense narratively speaking but it also feels much better in terms of the levels that they've designed here it's not to say that it's going to be easy to go through these areas stealthily but it does feel like that's what you're supposed to do as you explore the city you'll go through multiple mansions from other pirates as well and there's all sorts of cool lore items that you can discover in each of these mansions in addition letters written between the pirate captains that talk about the political intrigue and the things that were going on behind the scenes the tensions that you wouldn't have heard of in the old stories everybody just assumes that pirates will be pirates but they don't tend to think about the pirates feelings or emotions i love stuff like this it's taking a character that seems very monochromatic and one-dimensional like a pirate captain and humanizes them makes it much more real and once again it just reaffirms for me how badly i want naughty dog to tackle a pirate game in this way over on my luke stevens clips channel where i publish highlights of my live streams so that you can watch them even if you didn't make it live i do have a small video snippet from one of our streams where i talked about my dream game that i want naughty dog to make one day about anne bonnie and the golden age of pirates if you want to hear all my thoughts on that and see that video i'll have it linked below also make sure to subscribe to that clips channel so you see all these highlights even if you don't make it out to twitch eventually you stumble onto a dining room and inside are a bunch of bodies sitting at the table still wearing their outfits and their wigs and each of their places are marked with sigils the sigils of the pirate lords these are those who founded libertalia they were poisoned here right where they sit and they haven't moved in hundreds of years but there's two pirates missing thomas ii and henry avery it looks as though those two men betrayed all of the other pirate lords to take their treasure for themselves it's the quintessential example of extreme greed the pirate lord stole all of the money from all of the colonists and then when the revolt was squashed out and everybody was made an example of the pirate lords had to deal with each other but the pirate lords couldn't trust each other because they were well pirates so they started fighting amongst themselves and to try and subdue everybody thomas ii and henry avery invited everyone to henry avery's dining room to settle things once and for all but shortly after arriving and sitting down for dinner they were poisoned and thomas ii and henry avery it appears were left with all of the treasure for themselves and only each other to deal with but once again it doesn't take a genius to assume that it probably wasn't that long before thomas ii and henry avery started looking at each other questionably but the importance of this scene isn't actually just nathan going on and expositing about everything that went on here it's actually about elena's face as she watches him do so while he's going on and on about everything that happened here she can see his passion she understands that this is what keeps him going this is what drives him and in his heart deep deep down he's a treasure hunter this is what he does this is what he loves this is who he is he can love her and want to do what's best for her but for her to ask him to abandon this part of himself would be to ask him to change fundamentally who he is and i believe it's in this moment that she realizes she doesn't actually want that for herself or for nathan drake himself adventure has always been a part of his life and it's been a part of hers as long as she's known him since the very first game there's nothing they can do to change that and i think she's finally accepting it and she can start working with him to get him to accept it himself and perhaps do it in a more responsible way that doesn't ask him to commit so many atrocities or to do it in such a careless dangerous way invigorated with their latest discoveries of what happened here nate and elena push into henry's mansion and inside you see a ton of shoreline guys and of course have to deal with many of them in a large shooting arena that takes place at the grand staircase in the foyer of the building the level designers decided to throw several large heavily armored machine gunners at you in addition to lots of snipers i don't know i just don't find the machine gunners very fun i get it it's supposed to be that you like target weak points it shoots off the armor and then you can go and deal damage at their weakened spots but the gun play in uncharted 4 is nowhere near robust enough for this to feel fair and engaging and instead they usually just feel like large bullet sponges and nothing more so i i know i'm perhaps in the minority with this but i really dislike whenever they try to make a level really difficult and just throw two three four of these guys at you just feels like they're trying to pad out the level after everybody's been cleared you head into henry avery's office where you can see that sam and the shoreline people most likely rafe and nadine were just recently here you can tell this because sam left behind a couple of clues such as his lighter which he dropped on the floor to tell nate when he showed up eventually that they were here and that this is the right place to look for some sort of secret entrance so you start screwing around with everything from the globe to the armor on the wall to pictures that are hung a lane eventually touches the globe specifically where libertalia is supposed to be and a large spiral staircase opens under your feet so you descend it it's now that you'll begin descending down this large cavern and you'll get to navigate some interesting puzzles as well there's this one with a bunch of platforms that are laid out with some muddy footprints on them to tell you where you need to go this is where sam and the shoreline people crossed having all of the clues that they needed to solve the correct layout and way to approach it so you can bypass solving the puzzle yourself and just follow their muddy footprints however one of the paths is collapsed so you do have to do a little bit yourself specifically climbing up this pillar and climbing through some smaller caverns which probably weren't supposed to be here and are just the result of age and slowly collapsing ruins i guess this section shakes up the monotony of all of the jungle areas we've been exploring for the last like four hours of gameplay but it's just not interesting to me so many games have caves and bodies and rib cages that it just doesn't feel interesting or unique to me anymore furthermore there's a ton of these bodies which are rigged with explosives if you get close to them they set off large explosions injuring the player or potentially killing them if you're too close it seems like this was once again a result of the infighting between avery and thomas ii avery strung up a bunch of thomas's men and thomas strung up a bunch of avery's men and as a result they were forced into these mummifications and turned into booby traps themselves is it a bit of a stretch narratively i would probably say so but i get it it looks cool and you know pirates will be pirates so i guess we can just forgive it and move on you eventually discover a flare on the ground indicating that you're in the right place and you're following the track once again so you keep pushing on eventually running into more shoreline people fighting through some more shooting arenas and at this point you're probably feeling pretty fatigued this last act of the game carries on very long and there's not a whole lot that happens when you look at it on paper compared to the sections earlier in the game when there were constant narrative updates and beat shifts this section has carried on an uncomfortably long amount of time and it's not quite over yet you keep pushing through solve a quick puzzle the same one with the floor but this time you have the clue so you have to go and figure out which way to go and just as you think you're safe you find a large door you put the key you have in to the keyhole turn it and even though elena warned you it's a trap a trap goes off now nate and elena are captured and you quickly realize you're running out of time because one of those mummies lights up in the distance it starts to explode and then every other mummy in the room begins to ignite and detonate so you start swinging you grab a sword from another body that's hanging nearby cut yourself down and start running through the tunnel to try and escape it's very indiana jones and just when you think you're safe this happens when i first played this i was like no way she's dead it's just like old times huh hey hey elena come on elena my hero oh no you didn't do that i know right dick move elena pretending to be dead i i just like i get it it's kind of funny and i guess it makes sense that they play with her emotions like this but it it just i've didn't like this i've been very transparent since we started doing these uncharted videos i really like elena the one character i don't want them to kill off in these games is elena and when this happened to me the first time i just about freaked out so i'm very glad she's alive and i don't like them toying with my heart having escaped the caverns you can see a large shipyard below and this is probably my favorite section in this act of the game it's just really interesting visually at least as far as i'm concerned it's still a shooting arena there's a lot of verticality there's free climbing mixed with your grapple hook it's fine more of the same but the only thing i think it has going for it is just how visually unique it is thanks to its setting but even that is pretty short-lived because you're going to be moving out of the shipyard pretty quickly with elena's help you fight your way through waves and waves and waves of heavily armored enemies and this is probably the clearest indication you're nearing the end of the game whenever naughty dog in these uncharted games feels like they're running out of ideas or they don't have anything else to throw at the player before the game is over they just start slapping tons of enemies at you at once and calling it a day and that's certainly what happens here you reunite with sam who's managed to break away from rafe and nadine somehow and you fight through yet more enemies waves and waves and waves and waves and just when you thought you would have had enough there's an armored truck that shows up just like in madagascar it starts driving through buildings chasing you through the streets and using its fully armored turret to attack you incessantly there's nothing you can do here you just have to run away in the correct direction and quickly enough on your first try otherwise you die reload and you get to try again and this is my least favorite section of this act it's just tedious trial and error if you take a left instead of a right then you're just screwed and you have to reload even though there was no way or clear indication of where you were supposed to go it's just kind of lame eventually you reach a dead end find a couple of rpgs and launch them at the vehicle blowing it up at which point you see that solely is actually right here so you climb up to him and then the whole squad is reunited nate elena and sully are very resolved in just leaving the island leaving the treasure and moving on it's not worth risking their lives once more going up against this army but sam this is all he's known his entire life for the last 20 years this is all he's been thinking and dreaming about and now he's closer than he ever has been he's not gonna just go home and nate can understand this after all this is part of nate's personality as well but it doesn't change that it's very stupid so sam runs off saying he is sorry but there's nothing he can do this is who he is but nate insists that they just shouldn't do this they can't do this it's not worth it after all this time he's finally gotten out of prison he has his freedom he can move on and it will be okay sam begrudgingly initially agrees but after a quick moment or two while trying to get a large ramp unlodged so you can get down to the plane below sam and the rest of the group are separated and when this happens sam simply says he's sorry he got everybody into this but that he has to see it through so he runs off into the forest and nate is left with in his mind no choice but to hunt him down and save him elena gives nate her blessing understanding this is also who he is after the conversations that they had in the preceding sections and nate runs off to begin chapter 21 a brother's keeper to save his brother and hopefully get the treasure there's a bunch of quiet navigation swinging across cliffs and using your grapple hook to navigate across large caverns and it's actually quite peaceful i really like this section and it's beautiful to boot after about 10 minutes of climbing and swinging you find your way inside a cavernous area within the mountain there's a bunch of water and naturally caves it looks as though this is some sort of interior harbor where henry avery and thomas ii were able to store their ships and treasure before taking them out onto the open ocean in other words their ships would be protected in here and the colonists wouldn't have ready access to them in the distance you can see henry avery's ship looks like you found where the treasure is but nate is not the first one to get here rafe and nadine are already here and loading up their boats with gold nadine is there and is speaking with rafe and insists that most of her men are dead at this point and the ones who aren't dead have actually left the island or begun to escape makes sense they're dealing with a couple of homicidal maniacs outside i don't blame them furthermore nadine says very importantly i might add that henry avery rigged the ship and the entire cavern to explode with tons of explosive booby traps if anybody were to get close to the ship so she says she's taking what she can get and leaving just abandoning it and rafe insists that if they do this they will have effectively wasted all this time money and the lives of all of her men which is kind of true but i also don't understand why rafe couldn't just leave for a little while come back with a bunch of explosive specialists who can disarm all the booby traps and extract the gold safely i don't know why he has to do it right here right now like why can't he just pose up a couple of his men to watch for nathan and sam and then come back in a week or so with the correct teams and this is going to come up a little bit later in the game where i think it doesn't make sense how they handle this but we'll leave it there for now nate breaks away and starts swimming towards the ship but as he approaches he sees a massive explosion go off in the bow of the ship from this he infers that it must have been sam that broke onto the ship got a little too close to something and set off the explosive booby trap so he races in but once you enter the explosion hole that's left behind it's one of shoreline's men who set it off it wasn't sam so you make your way into the hole to look for your brother it's filled to the brim with gold and treasures galore this is where all of the treasure from all the pirate lords was collected and deposited i will say it's pretty impressive and there's certainly enough treasure here for many pirate lords to be arguing and fighting over it it makes sense eventually you find your way down into the cargo hold itself and once you go in you see rafe with a gun drawn and sam collapsed on the floor underneath a big wooden beam that's collapsed on top of him nade insists he just wants his brother he doesn't care about the treasure and rafe can have it all but instead of letting them go rafe insists on finishing this once and for all whatever that means nadine also shows up seemingly to help wraith but she double crosses him as well pointing to the characters on the floor it's there we can see henry avery and thomas ii collapsed still in their garb with swords through each of their chests they killed each other she points out that everybody who's obsessed with this treasure gets what they deserve and she doesn't want to be one of those people so she's leaving she closes the door behind her and leave sam nate and rafe in the treasure hold to die she says she doesn't care if they die but i mean she closed this door and rafe pounds on it but can't get it open so i think it's pretty safe to say she was trying to kill all of them again i i just don't get why she's supposed to be a likeable character like imagine if nathan drake did this to somebody in a cut scene so it's narratively canonical to the series and then we're supposed to be like yeah he's a totally good guy i don't know i just i can't stand nadine i'm sorry but now sufficiently agitated rafe starts to lose it he grabs a sword and begins to attack nate ferociously this starts a small mini game of sorts that's going to act as the finale of the game where you have to dodge left or right based on the attack that rafe swings at you it's really clunky and the fact that we haven't had to do this before in the game makes it feel even more out of place trust me i much prefer this to another shooting arena but if they had some sort of mini boss or something earlier in the game that implemented this same gameplay system i think it wouldn't have felt like such a weird out of place moment even so the two fight it out with the swords for the next couple of minutes trading damage and almost killing each other multiple times but after a few moments it seems as though rafe finally got the better of nathan he's on the floor staring down the sword of rafe however rafe is standing underneath a gigantic bag of gold treasures that's hanging from above that's tied with a rope down right next to nate so he swipes it cutting the bag and it falls square on wraith i don't think we have to question whether or not he's okay he's uh he's he's gone running out of time nate jumps up to try and help get the beam off of his brother sam sam insists that he should just leave and save himself but nate isn't going to let him do that so he looks around and he sees a cannon he shoots it off into the side of the hull itself flooding the compartment which seems like a really stupid move because it's going to start drowning his brother but he did it so that the water would help lift the log since you know wood floats usually and sure enough he gets his brother out from underneath the beam and they're able to escape through that same hole in the hole you then come out the other end and you see a light at the end of the tunnel literally as the ship slowly burns and capsizes you swim ever so fast towards the light as everything collapses around you the duo just barely escapes as the entire cave seems to collapse in on itself and elena and sully are out there waiting for them when they arrive the crew gets on sully's plane takes off and leaves i will say it's always struck me as odd that at the end of these games they act as though the treasure's just been lost and there's nothing they can do i get it if an entire city collapses into a freaking desert it makes sense that you wouldn't be able to easily recover this but you know exactly where henry avery's treasure is all of the booby traps that were supposed to go off just did and now all you have to do is get back into that cavern with a couple of scuba divers and you will be collecting the treasure that's worth billions of dollars there's really no reason i can come up with that this crew would just abandon or forget the idea of this treasure it doesn't make any damn sense to me even if the cavern itself collapsed the cavern collapsed on billions of dollars worth of treasure if ever there was a reason to try and evacuate a collapsed cave that would do it but i get it we need resolution and everybody needs to move on living happily ever after so nate elena sam and sully share their goodbyes sam says he's gonna work with sully on trying to chase down some more treasures nate and elena seem to have completely recouped their relationship and decide that they need to settle down once and for all we flash back to the merino where nate's place of employment is located jameson walks in very chipper and happy saying that he's just achieved his retirement and that he's selling the place it's obviously confused do you think he would have heard something about this but he seems genuinely happy for jameson he asks him who's buying it and jameson says well you are and he tosses him the keys baffled nate jumps up and runs outside only to see elena standing there she's coordinated this whole thing so it turns out that they got the permits in that morning for that malaysia job that was supposed to be so lucrative but that was illegal which is the only reason that nate didn't want to do it however with these permits they could stand to make millions upon millions of dollars being the only ones permitted to go out to that site so elena made some calls got the permits pushed through and went and contacted jameson to purchase the business when nate asks how she could possibly afford to buy this business she says that she found some coins in her jacket pocket the same jacket that sam had snuck a bunch of coins in before they left looks like he filled up a bunch of pockets with gold coins before they got off of the ship and so she can sell those and use them to pay for the business it fairly asks after all of this what happened to living a normal quiet life why is elena suddenly okay with doing this and she says it's just who they are it's what they're supposed to be doing when they were out on the island and she rescued nate from near death she realized that she also missed the adventure that he had missed for so long this is who they are it's what they should be doing she also points out that she can grab her cameras out again and perhaps reboot the tv series that she was trying to film in the very first game which is kind of a cool tie back and sure enough that's exactly what they do the camera fades to black and we come back in on a television set we get the chance to play crash bandicoot one more time but when you finish it the camera pans back around and it's not nate or elena it's a young girl sitting on her bed with a dog you explore the house a little bit finding some notes and tidbits scattered throughout even this letter with a picture pinned on the back of it showing sam and sully though i will point out sam and sully are notably older in this picture something that made me a little melancholy like i get it they're aging and this is a flash forward but it's still kind of sad to me to see sully so old oh i'm gonna tear up i'm moving on there's also some fun little tidbits in this note such as this little bit which says that they've lost the bet to both sam and sully 12 whole months and counting with no smoking whatsoever and they're in cuba for god's sake it's it's cool to see that they're doing well they kicked smoking and it i just liked this i thought this was great you eventually wander outside the house and realize you're on a beachfront property in what you can only assume is costa rica or some other tropical caribbean paradise when you run over to the guest house over in the distance you see a bunch of articles news clippings and magazine posters hung on the walls mentioning all sorts of adventures and treasures that have been discovered thanks to the pursuits of nate and elena you can also find another magazine specifically adventure life which shows a picture of the very girl you're playing as and it's titled treasure hunting it runs in the family suggesting that she is part of this family and if you're not getting it by now this is nate and elena's daughter she's the newest generation of treasure hunter and these are all of their collections and awards you can find a wardrobe open it up and inside there's a bunch of artifacts from all of the uncharted games including the cross of saint dismiss a creepy skull which might look familiar to those of you who have been watching these videos and you can even find nate's notebook filled with all of the detailed recordings of his adventures and you can also find this picture which is one of the original marketing material proof of concept pictures from the original uncharted game of a very young nathan drake elena and sully it's awesome but then you hear something outside so she quickly throws everything down on the bookcase closes the cabinet and turns around to see mom and dad nathan drake and elena they're notably older probably 15 to 20 years older and they can tell that she's broken into all of their goodies here so they decide it's time to have the talk where they share all of their adventures and what they've been through apparently they've kept all of this secret all this time because she wasn't ready but now it's time to share the details of how they met and how they got to where they are today so nate takes his daughter outside and begins telling her all of these stories elena stays behind and puts the picture of the crew back in the first game back in the notebook she walks away and the screen fades to black and that is the end of uncharted 4. and that's uncharted 4. i want to spend this last section of the video just speaking kind of off the dome about the game my overall impressions thoughts what's changed since it released and what i think the lasting legacy of the game is because when i first played this game back in 2016 it was utterly mind-blowing every aspect of it graphically in terms of the gameplay the fact that they were able to transition so smoothly from cutscene to gameplay at the time that was utterly groundbreaking and it really did make it look like naughty dog was miles ahead of the competition and in many ways they were but as i've had some time separated from the initial release of the game and we've gone through it again for this video i can see a lot of the shortcomings on a lot of the issues with the game i think there's a lot of issues with how they lean so heavily on shooting arenas but that's been an issue in the franchise since its first entry as we've gone through all of the games in the franchise for this series on uncharted it's become very very clear that these games have their design rooted in mid to late 2000s game design and that's why for some people when they play even the newer games in the franchise they still get that nostalgic uh scratch to that itch where it's sort of a flashback to when they were playing games when they were younger and i can appreciate that i can appreciate that at least the first couple times i play the game but eventually it gets very very tedious and i don't like it so i i have to point that out because it's a constant thorn in the side of anybody who's playing through these games is that the level design while it can be interesting visually and stimulating in terms of navigation with the grapple hook that's introduced in uncharted 4 for instance it's still at the end of the day shooting arenas and waves upon waves of enemies and even when you're fighting waves and waves of enemies because of the way that naughty dog design the gun play in uncharted from the first game you're expected to constantly swap between weapons instead of picking one that you like one or two weapons that you really like and just replenishing ammunition for each of those weapons you're constantly expected to juggle and bounce between 15 different weapons in the span of half an hour of gameplay and for some that keeps the gameplay interesting and engaging because you can never rely on one weapon above and beyond everything else but as far as i'm concerned it's just more tedious than it's worth i would much prefer the route that they took with the last of us part 2 for instance where you can have a set number of weapons that you can upgrade over the course of the game so there's a sense of progression and so that there's reasons to explore the levels with perhaps new attachments or cosmetic options for the weapons you're using to be found in the levels which is something that i think they started to play with with uh uncharted the lost legacy which we'll be talking about in the next critique uh of course with all of these collectibles scattered throughout the levels but in uncharted 4 1 2 and 3 that's just not something they play with you pick up a pistol you empty the clips in it and then you throw it by the wayside and go and find the next weapon to use and as far as i'm concerned it's just it's it's too boring it's uninteresting i know that some people have arguments for why they like the weapons constantly swapping in and out that it's more realistic or that it encourages the player to navigate the levels and actually go and land on the same location as the enemies they just eliminated so that they can swap to those weapons i can see all of that being true but to me it's just not a great excuse it doesn't change the fact that it is uninteresting and bland to me and it feels too arcadey for a modern title where you're constantly swapping weapons out it's just not my thing i acknowledge that it's more of a subjective opinion compared to an objective opinion but it's just not my favorite i don't like it there you go but the real bread and butter of uncharted 4 is the story and this marks the first major shift in the uncharted series in narrative approach in uncharted 3 we started to feel this shift developing where amy hennig the game director and one of the brains behind the operation over at naughty dog back at the time of uncharted one 3 two she's started uncharted and is really the brains beyond the operation she loved the kitschy campy design of those stories she loved the nazi zombies she loved the werewolves she loved the windigos she loved all this crazy stuff uh that sort of implied supernatural effects but with naturalistic explanation so there's supernatural things going on such as the gin in uncharted 3 but it has this naturalistic explanation in the form of this chemical that's being emitted from the jar but it was so poorly implemented in uncharted 3 that they imply that there's supernatural stuff actually going on um where characters are teleporting in and out of locations where they're surviving direct gunshot wounds and they just never address it and it really made uncharted 3 especially feel unfinished feel overly campy and like the narrative was just an afterthought because in many ways i think it was in uncharted 4 amy hennig was sort of welcomed to leave the development early on after they had spent probably a year in pre-production and after the last of us found amazing success and neil druckmann and bruce straley who of course started the last of us and saw that game through to its completion came in to sort of pick up the mantle and to carry on the development of uncharted 4 after amy hennig and the leadership at naughty dog decided that they were going to sort of part ways and originally they weren't supposed to see the game all the way through to its conclusion but they did because they realized it needed a lot of work and it was going to be hopefully really amazing when they got it all the way through development um and if you want to learn more about the development of uncharted 4 in much more detail than i can go into here i highly recommend jason schreier's books um he wrote blood sweat and pixels and press reset both of which are phenomenal books if you're interested in game development and how these titles get put together he did all sorts of interviews with these guys so highly highly recommend you check those out but one of the things discussed in those books about uncharted 4 and the development thereof was that naughty dog wanted to make an active effort to focus on inter-character relationships and develop those relationships over the course of a singular game and we saw that in spades when it came to uncharted 4. there are story arcs all over the place whether it's with sam and nate whether it's with sam and sully they start out as sworn enemies at the beginning of the game and then they end up being business partners by the end of the game or we see it of course with the relationship between nate and elena there are character arcs all over the place and it is so refreshing compared to uncharted 3 uncharted 2 uncharted 1 where everything was approached in the same way as a kitschy campy action adventure movie from the early 2000s it's fun it's light-hearted but there's nothing there it's like a junk food game in its purest form it's just popcorn and candy and skittles there's nothing of substance it's gonna be enjoyable but in a week you're not gonna look back on it too fondly it's like oh yeah that was pretty good and then you're gonna move on and i think this is in the same vein as a lot of the criticisms levied against uncharted 4 which is that it was way more serious than the previous games were and for some people especially die hard fans of the original trilogy of uncharted games it really felt like it was the last of us with an uncharted coat of paint it was really serious and they tried to be gritty in a lot of ways and that just lost some of the soul of the original games and while i can understand and appreciate that initial evaluation i can't fully agree with it because as far as i'm concerned uncharted has always been a little silly and light-hearted especially the early games they had a lot of ridiculous stuff in them but uncharted 4 is still pretty lighthearted it's not very serious the stakes are not very high the only characters they kill off are ones that they introduced this game for the sole purpose of killing off um even when they imply or suggest that there are high stakes such as every other occasion in the franchise when they suggest they're going to kill off a character naughty dog bailed at the last second whereas the last of us has no problem with killing off beloved characters that's not even a controversial thing to say at this point especially after the release of the second game so as far as i view it and as far as i'm concerned uncharted is still unique in the lineup of naughty dog titles they approach it very differently from the last of us they don't take the world as seriously they don't take consequences of the action of the actors and of the characters as seriously it's totally separate so while i can understand people seeing the increased graphical fidelity the focus on cinematic set pieces and big budget movie uh elements i can see that and see the comparison drawn between uncharted and the last of us but i think that's really where it stops the only comparison that's fair is to say that the budgets have increased and they're both really cinematic uh approaches to video games that's really where it ends for me so to criticize uncharted for being like the last of us i don't think it's fair if anything i don't think uncharted 4 is similar enough to the last of us to really excel as far as gameplay is concerned because it's still approaching its gameplay systems in the same way that they approached it back in 2007 2009 and it's just not that interesting to me anymore at the time the gameplay was good enough for uncharted 2 for uncharted 3 but in the modern day and back in 2016 for uncharted 4 i just don't think these games have aged very well but all that kind of brings us to the lasting legacy um the lost legacy as it were now the lasting legacy of uncharted 4. i still love this game i still think it's phenomenal i think there's a lot that it does really really well and i've played this game into the ground so i understand then i can admit that perhaps some of this is just fatigue at this point but after playing through the whole uncharted franchise i really have started to pick up on just how similar all of these games really are at the core they share the same basic plot line of nate with elena and part of his crew going to find some sort of treasure and then over the course of the story with all of these struggles he defeats the bad guy who wants the treasure for some amorphous ambiguous reason to fulfill some destiny they feel they have um or to to find wealth and power for themselves even though all of the enemies are already wealthy and powerful at the start of all of these games and then over the course of the journey nate realizes the treasure doesn't actually matter what matters are his friends and his family in the form of salmon in the form of elena in the case of uncharted 4. the games are all the same story they're likeable characters the stories are good enough they're silly and campy but there's just not a lot of meat on the bone at the end of the day and even though uncharted 4 tries to add a lot of meat to the bone it's still just not much in comparison to some of the other narrative experiences we've had in games in recent memory it's still great still a good game but certainly not anything that i think is truly revolutionary in the industry nothing that i would say uh will sort of end up in the history books of the most influential games in history but still really good and as far as a finish to nathan drake's storyline i think it does a really really good job especially the ending bit with his daughter and seeing nathan and elena having sort of agreed that this is what their life needs to be this is what's important to them and it they can't change who they are so they might as well embrace it i thought it did a really good job you see everybody is happy and healthy at the end of the day it's just a feel-good ending to a story that a lot of people were worried would end in nathan drake's death and demolishment and i'm glad it finished the way it did i think it was a good send-off for this character that a lot of people really love but now that we're done with uncharted 4 we arrive at the lost legacy which is what we'll be going through in the next critique and this game is one that a lot of people love a lot of people such as myself find it utterly lackluster uninteresting and borderline bad because the characters that the developers try to force down your throat and make likable just aren't likable at all but that's a story for another time we're gonna get into that in the next video make sure to like the video if you enjoyed it subscribe for the next critique so you see it the second it comes out and again follow all of my social media the link trees in the description box below i would really appreciate it if you joined up on the discord if you followed me on twitter followed my twitch all of that good stuff i'd love to see you over there again i'm giving away a bunch of copies of big aaa games that are coming out this year just as a thank you for being a subscriber so if you want to enter those giveaways just join the discord with that said i love you all so much more than you could possibly know thank you for making this a reality and possible i love you all i'll see you over on twitch on stream probably around the time this video goes live or i'll see you in the next video whichever comes first hugs and kisses i'll see you guys

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 296,039

Keywords: luke stephens, luke stephens uncharted, luke stephens uncharted 4, luke stephens critique, uncharted 4 critique, uncharted 4 review, uncharted 4 ps5, uncharted critique, uncharted ps5, critique, analysis, the ultimate critique, luke stephens cyberpunk

Id: m6hR6zKP0Ms

Length: 231min 34sec (13894 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 24 2022