The short clip is furrowing brows among PlayStation fans.
PlayStation recently put out a 1-minute video essentially advertising its platform as a whole by showing off its various gaming franchises, and a short clip has many thinking that the company is teasing the future of the Uncharted series.
The video is called “Live from PS5,” and it features a fictional news program where they cut between different reporters that are supposedly ‘live at the scene’ in different PlayStation worlds. We see Horizon Forbidden West, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, Final Fantasy XVI, and more. At one point, in the latter half of the video, we see what looks to be a young woman walking in a cave with a torch in hand approaching some sort of treasure. In another clip, she blows on it to blow away the dust.
This is undoubtedly a reference to the acclaimed PlayStation IP, Uncharted, and its inclusion does stand out among the rest. All the other franchises that were shown had mainline games that had released quite recently in the PlayStation 5 era, or games that were still on the way. The last mainline title in the Uncharted series was Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, which released in 2016, so this led many to speculate that the clip is teasing a future Uncharted project.
It could, of course, simply be that this is a standard reference to the iconic franchise. PlayStation technically did have an Uncharted game release this year on PlayStation 5 in the form of the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves collection, which bundles Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: Lost Legacy into one package. On the other hand, though, many have pointed out that the apparent female protagonist could be a reference to the potential future main character of the series.
Most other games had live-action renditions of their original protagonists, such as Aloy, Kratos, and Peter Parker, and if they didn’t, they didn’t show any character at all, like with Final Fantasy XVI and Ratchet & Clank. This Uncharted reference didn’t have a rendition of Nathan Drake, despite him being the undisputed face of the franchise.
Development studio responsible for Uncharted, Naughty Dog, recently stated that they were “done” with the IP, and had already moved on. However, recent job listings for a new PlayStation studio in San Diego mention working with Naughty Dog on a AAA title from a “beloved franchise,” which many have speculated to mean Uncharted.
