Uncharted 4 with stamina bar? That would have been good and bad at the same time

Climbing without limits, that’s how we know Nathan Drake in the Uncharted games. In Uncharted 4, our cheeky treasure hunter has aged a few years, but he doesn’t seem to mind that much. He still climbs, jumps and fights his way through ruins, jungle, steppes and wherever else he ends up.

But Nathan almost wasn’t so carefree agile, but had to pay attention to his stamina. This was revealed by Uncharted 4 co-writer Josh Scherr, who was visiting the YouTube channel CouchSoup. While he gives an understandable reason why the stamina bar didn’t make it into the game, the idea behind it was still good, if not desirable.

Nathan Drake never gets tired

Actually, things should have gone a little differently for Nathan Drake. Actually, he shouldn’t have climbed rock faces and swung over chasms so effortlessly. Actually, an endurance bar was planned for our smart daredevil to make the game more challenging.

Naughty Dog rejected this idea, which they experimented with a lot at the beginning. The reason: Stamina just didn’t fit the way Uncharted 4 wanted to combine platforming and gunplay. Josh Scherr on this:

The stamina bar may not have made it into the climbing mechanic, but the grappling hook did, which further expanded locomotion. In Uncharted 4, Drake feels all the more like a little climbing monkey who jumps from ledge to ledge, somehow avoiding every fall and thus, combined with the firefights, brawls and sneak attacks, can create a real “flow” feeling, for which an endurance Bar would probably have been more of a hindrance.

You can get a good impression of it in our Uncharted 4 test video:

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Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End – PS4 adventure test video

I love Uncharted for its relaxed nature. And once the controls have been internalized, I get a flow feeling when I fight my way from villain to villain with Nathan, swinging the grappling hook at the same time and then quickly hitting the scramble up the next rock face to knock down the next bad boy from behind. That just feels good and yet I would like to see a little more challenge over time.

Uncharted 4 offers me higher difficulties, of course, but paying attention to stamina would be a different kind of challenge. This would not only make the game look a little more realistic – well, the topic is lost with Uncharted anyway – but it would also force me to rethink how only stronger opponents just don’t even make it. It’s not primarily about skill, it’s about playing style.

The decision not to have the stamina bar built in was definitely the right one in order not to jeopardize the Uncharted feel. Nonetheless, I would have welcomed it as an optional setting. I’d at least play the game again in a heartbeat for this new option, and I’m glad that Nathan is no longer just looking like he’s working really hard in the cutscenes.

More Uncharted news:

You can catch the full Uncharted 4 video from CouchSoup that Josh Scherr was a guest in, by the way, on their Youtube channel look at.

But what do you say about the stamina bar? Do you envision this feature in a future Uncharted game, or do you think that would somehow spoil the Uncharted feel?