Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection may be the PS4’s virtual testament to Sony’s most roguish mascot, but it’s still missing one of its hero’s handheld adventures, and now fans finally know why, for the most part.
When asked by Power Up Gaming why the PS Vita’s Uncharted: Golden Abyss wasn’t included in the collection, Naughty Dog community strategist Arne Meyer replied that the game simply falls outside of the journey that takes Nathan Drake to next year’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.
“It was definitely under consideration, because we were trying to see how we could collect all of the Uncharted games,” Arne Meyer. But when we went back and looked at what we were trying to do with the Nathan Drake Collection, we realised that those three games – the trilogy – actually provided a particular narrative arc that led into Uncharted 4. We wanted to keep that as a holistic collection for that reason, and Golden Abyss kind of lives a little bit outside of that.”
As to why Uncharted 2 and 3‘s multiplayer aren’t included on the collection either, Meyer says that their exclusion was simply issue of contending with their still-thriving online communities.
“It was a really difficult decision for us,” he says, “but it was one that we actually took early on, because we were thinking about both our player population – we still have players playing Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3 multiplayer, and we still haven’t shut those servers down; we don’t have a plan to do that right now – and so, we were like, did we want to affect that player population, and splinter it even more so.”
Meyers adds that the studio is always moving forward with new ideas and isn’t one to dwell on its past – and apparently that means revisiting multiplayer modes.
“At the time, too, when we were talking with Bluepoint, and talking with our multiplayer team for Uncharted 4, we were saying, we learned a lot from Uncharted 2 and we really took it to the next level with Uncharted 3, so everything that we learned from that we were putting into Uncharted 4 multiplayer – so for us, it was like, why don’t we keep moving forward and progressing, rather than take a snapshot in time?”
The Nathan Drake Collection revisits the death-defying exploits of its namesake this November 10th exclusively for PS4.