An Uncharted remake would feel "like a cash grab," says OG designer who thinks Naughty Dog should make a new prequel instead
10 long years since Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, all of us Naughty Dog fans are ready for more Nathan Drake, even as the studio presumably barrels full-steam ahead on Intergalactic: A Heretic Prophet. We still have the Uncharted: Nathan Drake Collection, which includes beautiful remasters of the first three games, as well as the excellent Uncharted 4, on modern platforms, but for people like me who've played those games so many times you could recite the scripts by memory, the itch for another adventure in that world is stronger than ever.
Original Uncharted: Drake's Fortune designer Benson Russell feels the same, and just in case Naughty Dog is taking its marching orders from me and him, we don't want another remaster or remake.
"Uncharted as a thing is still in the zeitgeist," Benson tells FRVR. "There's already a version you can play on modern consoles [to] get the experience. What's the point of remastering [or remaking] it? ... You'd have to rewrite the whole story to make it better which means you're going to change the spirit and you're going to change the scenes and what the first one was about, right?"
Having played the Drake's Fortune remaster not too long ago, I think it holds up pretty well considering it first released in 2007, almost 20 years ago now, but again, I might be biased due to the amount of times I've played through it over the years. Even if its gameplay is a little dated and it doesn't nail the cinematic beats like, say, Uncharted 4, I definitely agree that a full-blown remake feels unnecessary at this point.
From Benson's perspective, the Uncharted series is still a modern-enough IP that it won't attract a "new audience" with a remake of Drake's Fortune, and he'd rather see Naughty Dog "take the lessons of Uncharted 4 and make a new game that’s in the past or wherever you need it to be." Benson adds that he felt the same way about Naughty Dog's somewhat controversial remake of The Last of Us. "These are old games for a reason," he says.
Ultimately, an Uncharted remake would feel "more like a cash grab than it would feel like anything necessary at this point," argues Benson, which is what a lot of fans thought about The Last of Us Part 1 when it came out. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a good deal older than The Last of Us, and it does feel that way when you play it, but with Naughty Dog only able to take on so many projects at once, I think most would agree an Uncharted 5 or prequel is much more attractive than Uncharted: Part 1.