Naughty Dog has today elaborated on the removal of Uncharted 2 and 3’s multiplayer components from the upcoming Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection.
Following a presentation at EGX 2015 on the history of the series, Naughty Dog’s community strategist Arne Meyer was questioned by Power Up Gaming on the removal of online gameplay from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception in the Bluepoint Games-ported compilation.
In response, Meyer reiterated the fact that the two games have an existing online population that Naughty Dog didn’t want to splinter, while also shedding a little more light on the decision-making process:
“It was a really difficult decision for us, 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.
“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?”
Meyer added that the studio wanted to keep its developers focused on the future, and that the exclusion of UC2 and 3’s online play was one of the reasons the Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End beta is being included in the Nathan Drake Collection, “so [fans] get a chance to see how far we’ve come with our multiplayer.”
