Trivia / Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

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• Acting for Two: Evelyn and Sister Catherine are both played by Merle Dandridge.
• B-Team Sequel:
  • Justin Richmond, who directed the first three games, stepped down during the game's production, as did creative director Amy Hennig. They were replaced by Bruce Straley and Neil Druckman, respectively.
  • Henry Jackman took over for Greg Edmonson as the game's composer.
• Blooper: The flashback sequence with young Sam and Nate in Evelyn's mansion takes place in roughly 1990, before the fall of the Soviet Union; Nate even points out the Soviet Union on a globe. However, one of the books he's able to pick up is a journal attributed to a scholar at Saint Petersburg State University— which would have been known, at the time, as Leningrad State University.
• Completely Different Title: The Japanese title is Uncharted: The Pirate King's Last Secret Treasure.
• Creator Backlash: Downplayed, but Laura Bailey believes that she should have pushed back more against playing a black woman as a white actor.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Troy Baker as Nate's older brother Sam. In real life, Baker is 5 years younger than Nolan North.
  • Also, 19-year old Kaitlyn Dever as 15-year old Cassie Drake.
• Fake Brit: Merle Dandridge (American of Japanese, Korean and African descent) as the white British Evelyn. Subverted by Sister Catherine, Dandridge's other role, who is a black American nun.
• Fake Nationality:
  • White American actress Laura Bailey plays the Black South African (though possibly Cape Coloured) Nadine Ross.
  • British actor Robin Atkin Downes as the Panamanian Hector Alcazar.
  • Dominican-American Hemky Madera and Mexican-American Alejandro Edda as Panamanians Vargas and Gustavo, respectively.
  • Played with by Knot and Orca. They're South Africans, and Knot is voiced by Anglo-French JB Blanc. Gideon Emery, who voices Orca, is English, but he was brought up in South Africa.
• The Other Darrin: In the multiplayer mode, Harry Flynn is not voiced by Steve Valentine, and his voice isn't even remotely similar to his original voice.
• The Other Marty: Nate's brother Sam was voiced by Todd Stashwick in the first Uncharted 4 trailer, but was replaced by Troy Baker in the final game.
• Troubled Production: As detailed in this article discussing the crunch situation for The Last of Us Part II, the development team ended up spending extremely long hours at the office working on Uncharted 4, to the point that it was interfering in their private lives. The shift in director from Amy Hennig to Neil Druckmann about midway through development only propagated an already bad crunch cycle as Druckmann chose to rewrite large portions of the original script. Perhaps most telling, of the 20 lead designers credited on the game, 14 of them ended up quitting Naughty Dog altogether after the development had wrapped.
• Underage Casting: 39 year old Merle Dandridge as Evelyn, a sick elderly woman.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As per Jason Schreier's book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, the original concept of Uncharted 4, under Amy Hennig, was worked on with a very small team, who, as Nolan North remarked, left behind 8 months of finished work. This version of Uncharted 4 was intended to be a little different. The first section of the game would have been melee and stealth focused, with Nathan Drake not carrying a gun, albeit having the grappling hook and climbing tool in the final product. It would have been traversal focused, as a way to address the heavy gun violence of the earlier games.
  • Nadine was originally going to be white and early concepts of her were used during early casting calls, around which time Laura Bailey was cast for the role. However, after the casting the choice was made to make Nadine black without recasting Bailey.
  • Graham McTavish and Alan Tudyk filmed scenes for Uncharted 4 (with McTavish reprising Charlie Cutter) but both left after their contracts were voided when Amy Hennig left the project. Tudyk voiced Rafe and Todd Stashwick (whose voice-over can be heard in the original announce trailer) played Sam^note Incidentally, Rafe and Sam in the final game are Ink-Suit Actor for Tudyk and Stashwick. Their roles were recast and much of the dialogue changed. The main difference between the final versions is that Sam would have started out as a villain, and openly allied with Rafe, and the major reveal in the game would have been that Sam is Nate's brother. Eventually Sam would still team-up with Nate and take out Rafe in the finale, so it wasn't too different from the final game, and the new reveal featuring the lying flashback of Hector Alcazar is a leftover trace of this concept.
  • Since Sam and Rafe were villains in the original concept, Elena would have accompanied Nate on the adventure from the start, and the Italian auction scene would have been more elaborate featuring shifts between multiple player characters as they conduct a simultaneous heist, and there would have been a DanceDanceRevolution style scene between Nate and Elena at the auction, where they dance as a couple.
  • The real major change between the change in teams, was that Amy Hennig, while floating the idea of Uncharted being Nate's final adventure, had still left the game more open-ended. Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley however felt that Nate's story in Uncharted had run its well dry and it needed a proper finish. In addition, Nate was originally going to have a son in the Epilogue, and the English archaeologist whose mansion Sam and Nate break into as kids was going to be male, until they changed both of them into female characters.

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