Characters of the Uncharted series
The Uncharted series, created by video game developer Naughty Dog, features many characters. The series includes the video games Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, as well as a motion comic prequel, Uncharted: Eye of Indra. It primarily focuses on the exploits of treasure hunter Nathan Drake and his associates as they hunt down various mystical artifacts.
In Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, he must stop a British crime lord and his group of South American mercenaries and Southeast Asian pirates from collecting a cursed golden idol known as "El Dorado" and using it as a biological weapon. In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, he races a homicidal Serbian war criminal, a British treasure hunter and his army of henchmen to find the powerful and mythical Cintamani Stone in Shambhala. In Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, he competes with a British secret society, Cockney gangsters and Yemeni pirates to search for the fabled 'Iram of the Pillars', and in the prequel comic Uncharted: Eye of Indra, he works for an Indonesian crime lord in order to get the money needed to raise the coffin of his supposed relative Sir Francis Drake. In Uncharted: a Thief's End, he and his brother Samuel Drake compete with an American businessman and a South African Private Military Company to find the fabled pirate colony of Libertalia.
Nathan Drake is the primary playable character of the series. He has a shady past, in which he associated with a number of thieves and black market salesmen in order to obtain various valuable items. The development team sought to make him a generally average and likeable character. He is accompanied by a number of characters, the main ones being Elena Fisher and Victor "Sully" Sullivan. He has had two love interests in the series so far; the aforementioned Elena Fisher, a reporter and now his wife, and Chloe Frazer, another treasure hunter and an old flame, but was involved with Rika Raja in the motion comic. He is also accompanied by his longtime friend, associate, and mentor, Victor Sullivan.
A team at Naughty Dog designed the character appearances, and Amy Hennig was the main writer of their personalities and mannerisms. The voice actors were given considerable license to improvise the lines and influence character personality, and also performed the motion capture work for their characters. Many of the characters were meant to highlight different aspects of Drake's personality. Reception to the characters in the series have been fairly positive, with most commentators focusing on the believable nature of the characters and their interactions with each other. The inclusion of strong female characters has also received praise. The voice acting has also received acclaim, including two Interactive Achievement Award nominations.
Creation and conception
Illustrator and designer Kory Heinzen worked on pre-visualization and concept design for many of the characters in the Uncharted series. Early on, the Naughty Dog development team drew a number of concept sketches depicting characters hanging from cliffs and handling weapons awkwardly; many of these concepts directly translated into the final character products. The more fluid character motions were improvised on a motion capture stage, and were not scripted or drawn beforehand. Amy Hennig, the series' creator and writer for the first three games, designed the characters' personalities and mannerisms. The production team sought to capture a certain tone in the character design, and closely studied the pulp adventure genre for inspiration. This included drawing characteristics from Tintin, Doc Savage, and a number of movies. They tried to contrast with other western games, which lead game designer Richard Lemarchand described as "overwrought and all a bit emo".The game developers and animators worked closely together to ensure that the expressions and movements of the characters matched with the desired tone of the games. The character designs were kept intentionally simple, as the designers wanted character personality defined by actor performances, rather than "trinkets attached to the character model". Focus was instead placed on a realism in the animation to highlight character humanity. A blended animation system developed especially for the game allowed one character animation to begin before the previous one had ended, aiding this realism. The ultimate goal was to make the characters react as if they were real people in a realistic world. To accomplish this, many of the character reactions were conveyed through facial expressions and body language rather than explicit dialogue.
Hennig believes character emotion grew from the "production of the game as if it were a traditional movie or stage play". The two lead actors were cast because of their experience on stage and film works. The cast had a large role in developing the characters. They were allowed to ad-lib dialog and participate in revising the script. The actors also read lines together on a sound stage, allowing them to play off of one another and organically grow the character relationships. Both games used the same actors for both motion capture and voice acting. The actors did a number of read-throughs and practiced to get the motions correct before capturing.
Naughty Dog consciously avoided action game stereotypes, including super-powered heroes and overly sexualized female characters. They included a large cast of characters to ensure that the story was character-driven rather than story-driven. Co-president of Naughty Dog Evan Wells said: "I honestly think that the key element, if you really want to boil it down, is characters. People will tell a story, but if it's not a character-driven plot then you are missing something". Many of these characters were specifically designed to highlight different facets of Nathan Drake's personality.
Main characters
Nathan "Nate" Drake
Nathan "Nate" Drake is the protagonist of the Uncharted series. Nolan North voices Drake, also providing motion capture for the character. North has had considerable influence in the development of the character, mixing his personality with Drake's. Drake is a playable character in five video games of the series: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, and Uncharted: Golden Abyss. He is also the protagonist of the motion comic Uncharted: Eye of Indra. Nathan Fillon played Drake in the 2018 live action fan film and Tom Holland played Drake and Tiernan Jones as a young Drake in the 2022 live action film adaptation. Drake is depicted as a professional treasure hunter with a shady background involving various people from the underground illegal goods market. He is highly intelligent, self-educated in history and various languages, and a supposed descendant of Sir Francis Drake. In the first two games, he seeks a mythical treasure.In Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, he uses the diary of Francis Drake to track the mythical El Dorado to a small island in the Pacific Ocean. He and his partner Victor Sullivan discover that El Dorado is actually a large golden statue that curses those who attempt to steal it. Drake must stop pirates led first by Gabriel Roman, and later Atoq Navarro and his mercenaries, from using the statue's power to turn people into zombies as a weapon. In the end, Drake succeeds in defeating Navarro and returns home with Sullivan and reporter Elena Fisher, who brought chests of treasure with them.
In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, he is hired by an old friend named Harry Flynn to help him steal an oil lamp from a museum that might point to the location of Marco Polo's lost fleet. When Flynn betrays him, Drake sets out to stop the former's employer, warlord and war criminal Zoran Lazarević, from discovering the location of Shambhala and the mystical Cintamani Stone. Drake tracks him to a monastery, where he discovers the entrance to Shambhala. Lazarević locates and consumes part of the Tree of Life, but is bested in combat by Drake and killed by the guardians of Shambhala.
In Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Drake, Fisher, and Sullivan journey to the lost city of Ubar in order to stop the leader of the old Hermetic Order and her associates from obtaining a psychological weapon from its waters. The game also explores the relationship between Drake and Sullivan, showing their first meeting when a 15-year-old Drake tried to steal a cipher device belonging to Sir Francis Drake. In the conclusion, Drake and Sullivan escape from the ruins of the lost city, and Drake reconciles with Fisher.
In Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, a now-retired Nathan lives a happy and normal life with Elena, until his long-lost older brother Samuel, presumed dead in a prison escape, appears and pulls Nathan back into his old life by feeding him a false story of a prison breakout involving notorious drug lord Hector Alcázar. Nathan ends up embarking on a globetrotting journey to the mythical lost city of Libertalia in search of Henry Avery's lost treasure, competing with a wealthy and cruel businessman named Rafe Adler, who happens to be a former associate of the Drakes, and his associate Nadine Ross, who oversees a private military company. Against the odds, Nathan manages to kill Rafe, saves his brother, and returns home with Elena. Years later, Nathan and Elena have become famous explorers and have a teenage daughter named Cassie. When Cassie finds relics from his previous adventures, they decide to tell her their stories.
Naughty Dog gave Drake a very strong personality, as they did not want him to act blandly. He often thinks out loud, and comments and complains on the absurdity of his situations, a tendency Matt Casamassina of IGN called "lighthearted and amusing". Drake's appearance is generic, usually appearing in a plain shirt and jeans. This was to make him seem like an "ordinary guy". Throughout the series, he has various romantic interests. In the first game, there is tension between him and Elena Fisher, a reporter filming a documentary on his findings. In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Drake enters an affair with his crime partner Chloe Frazer. However, by the course and end of the game, he becomes involved with Fisher again, and by Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, he has married her.