Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End will not feature the return of Donut Drake, its creative director has revealed.
Speaking with the chaps at GamesRadar, Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann revealed that the character was considered at one point, but ultimately the team decided to eschew Nate’s portly alter-ego from the upcoming sequel.
"I didn’t want to have a laugh at someone’s expense," adding that, "I thought we’d matured beyond that."
"We actually had the whole thing modelled and in there," Druckmann revealed, before saying the team "decided to make the call not to do it. We had a big debate about it and kind of approached it from all kinds of angles and decided we weren’t comfortable having it in our game."
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is scheduled for release exclusively on PlayStation 4 on May 10, 2016. The games take place three years after the events of the Uncharted: Drake’s Deception, with Nate coming out of a cosy lifestyle with wife Elena to track down a legendary pirate’s treasure.
Naughty Dog has injected some new features into this latest entry in the treasure hunting franchise, chief among which includes the addition of large-scale environments to explore. In addition, Nate is more handy with his fists this time around, and can employ better stealth tactics to avoid enemies.
While this is the studio’s final Uncharted game (not to mention the last one to feature Drake), the developer has admitted it has no problem with another team taking charge of the franchise, providing it does a good job of it.
The former Crash Bandicoot developer also revealed that it has at least one more game in the pipeline for the PS4, and has said it plans to revisit prototypes for The Last of Us 2 once it’s polished off Uncharted 4’s single-player DLC.