Uncharted Collection could repeat Last of Us Remastered’s success, says Naughty Dog

Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection could prove as massively popular as Naughty Dog’s last triple-A re-release.

The Last of Us Remastered dominated the UK retail rankings upon its release on PS4 last August, claiming three chart top spots, as well as becoming the best-selling game of the month and the fifth-biggest release of the year to date.

With all three PS3 Uncharted games coming to PS4 in the form of the Nathan Drake Collection this Friday, Naughty Dog’s community strategist Eric Monacelli told MCV he expects a similarly fervent reception.

I do, personally, expect the Uncharted Collection to do as well as The Last of Us Remastered,” he said.

Company-wide, our studio loves it. They set the bar at [the studio porting the games to PS4] Bluepoint and did a really good job with everything – adding new features and making sure that everything looks good.

So, yeah, our expectations are high for it. We hope it does quite well.”

Sony owed much of The Last of Us Remastered’s success to the large proportion of PS4 players who didn’t own a PS3 when the game originally came to the older platform.

Monacelli added that the very same untouched audience on PS4 could drive the Uncharted Collection’s sales.

It’s pretty massive,” he admits. We did a lot of research and discovered that about 80 per cent of the people that own a PS4 have never played Uncharted, period. That was one of the reasons why we thought remastering it would be a good idea.

"The other reason is we decided we wanted to do it; especially when we got The Last of Us Remastered done, we thought ‘Oh man, this would be cool if we could go back’.”

Given the huge commercial and critical success to The Last of Us, it’s unsurprising that multiple rumours of a sequel have been circling the internet in recent months. But Monacelli hinted that Naughty Dog’s next project could be something far more surprising.

We tend to work on one game at a time,” he explained. Uncharted 4 is what everybody’s working on. After that, we’re going to be working on Uncharted 4 DLC.

Beyond that, there’s been tons of ideas bandied around – everybody knows the rumour about The Last of Us 2. There could potentially be – who knows? We could go back to Jak and Daxter 4 if it seems right, or there could be something else in the future on our horizon.

We tend to work with an idea always on the board and then once we have time to devote the right amount of attention to it, then we’ll tackle it.”