Uncharted 4: A Thief's End - Using reality to deliver the ultimate fantasy

Unremarkable protagonists are common in films and literature because they make it easy for an audience or reader to imagine that the events in the story are happening to them. However, they're unusual in games because the events are already, unequivocally happening to the player, who therefore wants those events to be as fun and empowering as possible. If it's a given that you are the protagonist anyway, wouldn't you rather play as a space marine/cyborg/wizard/demon hunter than just a "guy in a t-shirt"?

Most players would, or think they would, so Naughty Dog's decision to make Nate an "everyman who struggles to get by" was a deliberate one to wrong-foot the player, who'd be unable to form any expectations about the adventure based on what the protagonist looked like he was equipped to do. Moreover, in contrast to superhuman video game characters, who can use their powers to overcome obstacles, Nate's limited skill-set means his survival often relies on good luck and improvisation, which raises the stakes of each encounter.


However, this ending left nowhere for a sequel to go. The first three games in the series presented and enforced a dichotomy between Nate's lust for adventure and his need for love: the former destructive and the latter redemptive. When Uncharted 3 brought his arc to an apparent conclusion by having him choose love, it seemed there was no meaningful way for the series to proceed. Within the established framework, the only options for a sequel would have been to either undo the character development of the earlier games, or to to repeat them, reaffirming established truths, but saying nothing new.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016) avoids both of these pitfalls by adding the bittersweet complexity of the real world to its morality, its character development and its world, all of which were defined in previous games by a fantastical simplicity. By re-calibrating Nate's world so that it is more like the player's, Uncharted 4's ending doesn't just show players that everything works out for the hero, but actually taps into their fantasies about their own life, thus delivering a wish-fulfilment far more potent than any of the previous games.

It makes its intentions clear early on, in a sequence that shows that Nate's choice at the end of Uncharted 3 hasn't brought him the happiness that he and the player thought it would. He and his now wife Elena are trying their best to live a normal life, but Elena's job writing puff-pieces for travel magazines leaves her dissatisfied, and Nate's work as a salvage diver is a poor substitute for treasure-hunting, so he spends his evenings fantasising about past exploits. Neither is happy.

This casts doubt over Nate's ability to bring a happy ending to fruition, not because, as in previous games, he may lack the skills to find treasure or defeat evil, but because his nature is fundamentally at odds with the trappings of a stable, law-abiding life. It's a troubling sequence because it's so recognisable: many people have tried their hardest to live a certain way, been unhappy, made what seems like a rational decision to live differently, and yet still found themselves unhappy. In Nate's case the diverging paths - lawlessness and domesticity - may be extreme, but his dilemma is one that most people face at some point. If you've explored both the paths that life seems to offer and neither made you happy, what are you supposed to do?

Nate, flawed as ever, does what all too many of us might do in such a situation, and jumps on the first excuse that presents itself. When his brother Sam - whom Nate had long given up for dead - reappears claiming to need Nate's help to find a legendary stash of pirate treasure to pay off his bounty, Nate chooses not only to believe the story, but convince himself that the right thing to do is go with Sam, risk his life, and lie to Elena about it. The fact that Sam's story turns out to be a lie is almost irrelevant as far as the wrongness of Nate's decision is concerned, because the dramatic conflict in the story comes from his struggle to acknowledge both to Elena and himself that his motivation is selfish.

It's also important that Uncharted 4 is the first game in the series in which the treasure is just, well, treasure. In each of the preceding games, Nate sees sense and decides to go home, only to find out that the mythical MacGuffin actually possesses apocalyptic supernatural powers, and that he needs to stop the crime boss/warlord/cult leader from getting hold of it. By dispensing with magic, Uncharted 4 makes the motivation of everyone except steely mercenary Nadine Ross (of whom more later) purely emotional. Sam wants to make up for half a lifetime behind bars, nasty Rafe Adler wants to prove he's more than just his parents' money, and Nate's trying to fill a void.

This not only adds weight to the story, but by giving Nate a mundane life he guiltily wishes to escape from, also gives him something in common with the player, who is firing up the PlayStation after a hard day to roam free over the wilds of Scotland or the lush plains of Africa, where all problems can be solved by pulling either a lever or a trigger. It's much easier for a player to immerse themselves in a video game when the character they're controlling wants to do the same things as they do, and Uncharted 4 makes it easy to believe that itchy-footed Nate relishes the thrill of exploring the fantastic locations just as much as the player does. 

Uncharted 4 goes further in its quest to align the protagonist's experience with the player's by taking small steps to alleviate the ludonarrative dissonance that has dogged the series since its inception. The term refers to the disconnect between what a player is told about a video game character during cutscenes and what the character actually does during gameplay, and with a lovable protagonist at odds with its vast bodycount, the Uncharted games have arguably exemplified it better than any others since it was coined.

The violence may be incongruous with Nate's characterisation, but it's also required for gamification, pacing and economic feasibility: without it, the series could never have achieved the sales required to allow for the scale, graphics, motion capture, music, and everything else that makes Uncharted what it is.

Consequently, the player needed to interpret the violence figuratively instead, in the same way that an audience must accept theatrical devices such as props and gestures as the things they represent, not the things they actually are. Just as the actor’s donkey mask in A Midsummer Night’s Dream represents a living animal head that cannot be removed from Bottom’s human body, so Uncharted’s violence represents a practical hurdle that Nate must bravely and deftly overcome in the same way he solves ancient mechanical puzzles and traverses treacherous crevasses.

This is underscored by Nate's squeamishness about killing any character with a name. He takes an oddly principled stance against finishing off genocidal maniac Lazaravic at the end of Uncharted 2, and even goes as far as to try and save the life of sadistic cult leader Marlowe at the end of Uncharted 3. The lives of these head honchos should be worth the same as those of their many employees, and yet Nate differentiates. In order not to break immersion, the player has to assume the same viewpoint.