From Eurogamer: "The climbing mechanic in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End almost saw lithe hero Nathan Drake come with his own little stamina bar in a bid to give an extra layer of difficulty to the game.
Naughty Dog's Josh Scherr, who co-wrote A Thief's End with Neil Druckmann and then went on to co-write The Lost Legacy, was a guest on YouTube channel Couch Soup over the weekend. Here, Scherr shared more about his illustrious career with Naughty Dog (which has spanned over 20 years) and gave some behind the scenes insight into Uncharted 4's development."
"A lot of the stuff that happens early on are prototypes of design things that eventually make it in [to a game]," Scherr explained. "We were looking to do some interesting things with the climbing mechanics [in Uncharted 4]... the long story short version of that is that we did all these interesting things with a stamina bar, trying to make it feel more challenging."
“However, this idea ultimately got scrapped as the Uncharted 4 team felt it "got in the way the way [of how Naughty Dog] liked to blend [its] platforming and gunplay".
"We didn't want to have people paying attention to stamina while they were also outrunning people shooting [at them] and all that kind of stuff," said Scherr. "We wanted to keep everything quick and moving along."
I’m glad they kept everything “quick and moving along” knowing that Uncharted has always been that “Summer Blockbuster” don’t wanna put the game down type of gaming experience!
I won’t say it wouldn’t have offered something interesting to the gameplay, had the team done this, because after originally playing TLOU when it released, I did think I’d be interesting to see Uncharted bring on some new form of health bar system, and the more you get shot at or hit in physical combat Nate gets injured and you’ll have to search for health packs (Like Last of Us) to hear him. But the difference with U4 would be depending on your level of injury, this would be taken into account and your moves would look sloppy, hits wouldn’t be as hard hitting etc. I can’t imagine that kinda work that’d go into making all those game systems work, let alone stamina, but just in theory, I woulda liked to try something like that “play-test” it anyways.
In the end, their formula worked great (as it always has) and the additions they did add in the game helped it feel fresh enough, while familiar, and an overall blast and wonderful conclusion to Nathan Drake’s globe trotting adventures.
Man, do I miss him Nate, Elena, Sully and Chloe!!!
Glad they kept it as it is, Uncharted 4 was a brilliant product.
I'm glad they didn't. It would totally break the flow.
I don’t want Drake falling off mid monkey bars.
Yeah it was for the best. Uncharted is based on suspension of disbelief and a stamina bar would have messed it up.