Uncharted 5 (Sony Said No!)
Will There Be Uncharted 5?
While trying to find out if Uncharted: Golden Abyss was ever going to get remade, I started going down some rabbit holes. One of the rabbit holes was about Bend and their involvement in the Uncharted series, since Golden Abyss was made by the studio a decade ago.
What is Bend doing after Days Gone and why hasn’t Golden Abyss seen a remake like almost every other Uncharted title? TLDR, it doesn’t seem like it will be happening anytime soon, but it also doesn't sound impossible. However, the most interesting thing was what I found when digging through interviews with Jeff Ross, former director at Bend.
Years Gone
After Days Gone, Bend pitched Sony the idea about making a new Uncharted game. In 2016, Uncharted: A Thieves End released and it appeared that Nate was calling it quits, leaving minimal areas for the series to go without the OK from Naughty Dog.
Unless you don’t want to continue the story of Nathan Drake, but instead want to flesh out the universe. Just like Golden Abyss, which was somewhat of an origin story for Nathan, Bend wanted to go even farther back to the origin of the series to the 1970’s with Victor Sullivan AKA Sully.
Uncharted: Sully
Making Uncharted: Sully seems like a great idea. It keeps one of Sony’s most popular IP’s going with a new entry, while Naughty Dog can continue to expand their portfolio. Bend has also displayed their competence to develop an AAA Uncharted game after making Golden Abyss for the PSVITA, which did quite well and Days Gone. Both games weren’t perfect, but you could see potential to take a chance on the studio to create something bigger.
There is also zero risk with making a Sully game that is set in the 1970’s because it won’t affect the universe that Naughty Dog had spent years creating. If anything, it just fleshes out the world even more. To negate the risk even further, you don’t even need to label the game Uncharted. It could have just been called Sully or Sullivan and enough people would have linked the two without the possibility of tarnishing the Uncharted brand. Its not like Fortune Hunter or Fight for Fortune did any damage to the brand.
The opportunity won't be around forever as the window is closing as Richard McGonagle, who voices Sully, is not getting any younger. The actor is currently 75 years old and the opportunity to use his voice for the character won’t be around forever.
It was 2016 when Uncharted, A Theives End released, which was the last mainline entry in the series. Lost Legacy came out in 2017 but that was a spinoff with Chloe and Nadine. The last game featuring Nate or Sully has already been six years meaning that we are due or even overdue for a new entry in the series and at least having something in development from Bend would have been a good idea.
A True Thieves End?
Combine the extended absence of the series with the success of the recent film which did over 400 million in box office against a 120 million dollar budget and you have what seems like a perfect storm for Uncharted Sully to have been a massive success.
Unfortunately, since Sony didn’t green light the Bend pitch we will never know. The only reason I can think that Sony wouldn’t have wanted this, was if Naughty Dog was already working on something similar in the Uncharted universe.
As of right now the only thing that we know that Naughty Dog is working on is the multiplayer game set in the Last of Us universe. Naughty Dog is between 500-600 people approximately, meaning that there is no way that the whole studio is working on one multiplayer game and hopefully the reason that Bend didn’t get approval for Sully is because Naughty Dog is already working on something even better.