Uncharted is in the news for some interesting reasons today.
First off, on an official capacity, GOG has launched their Black Friday sale with the debut of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection on their platform. This means that Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy are available DRM-free. Of course, this is also the first time that any Uncharted games are available DRM-free.
While GOG nowadays is competing with Steam by offering its own downloader and game management client, GOG Galaxy, you can download the games with separate installers. That gives you the option of clean downloads that are also easy to uninstall. Furthermore, these installs aren’t tied to any game client, so you can be secure that if you uninstall them, there won’t be any residue folders or files hiding in your computer afterwards. While many gamers prefer the convenience of installing and uninstalling from just Steam, this DRM-free option is why GOG has emerged as a successful platform in the first place.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection joins God Of War, Days Gone, and Horizon: Zero Dawn as PlayStation games available DRM-free. That’s a surprisingly progressive move from a company that publishes these games to sell their console. Of course, we know Sony has gone in this direction so that they can make up whatever revenue they need to justify making these games at their high budgets. Still, it’s something we can say that Sony is doing that is more progressive than their other hardware competitors.
And this is where this other piece of news dovetails nicely in as well. As reported by Tech4Gamers, fans told Sony and Naughty Dog about the remasters that they want; not for a two year old game like The Last of Us Part II, but for old games that really haven’t been rereleased in years, the first three Uncharted games.
As the common consensus among fans go, Uncharted 2 is the peak of the series, but all three games are arguably better than the titles in Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection. The case for remastering these games is clear; it’s not that the PlayStation 3 no longer exists, and in fact the PlayStation 3’s PlayStation Store is still active.
It’s that these games deserve celebrating, but they’re already obsolete by today’s standards. Remastering these games would not necessarily about game preservation, as the discs are common and they’re still available online. Instead, it’s about getting the first games in line with the later titles. Modern aiming systems, maybe even game design overhauls for two of the titles would serve them well.
Does asking for these remasters mean that they are going to happen? Sony surely must be seeing how successful Capcom is in their remasters of the Resident Evil games and recognize the money they can make there too. But we’ll just have to wait and see when they indicate their interest.
