Apparently, since Amy Hennig’s departure from Naughty Dog left some sadness throughout the fans of the franchise, little was known about her decision to leave the studio. As reported by PlayStation Lifestyle almost 3 years ago, it was rumored that Hennig was forced out by directors Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley.
However, Naughty Dog denied the claims that she was forced out.
After 3 years, a book written Kotaku’s News Editor, Jason Schreier, got recently released and is titled “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels”. The book gave us more understanding of Amy Hennig’s resignation and about her ideas for Sam Drake’s role in Uncharted 4.
As shared by Reddit user wellgun3, these are some of the paragraphs from the book that talked about Amy’s resignation rumors.
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Uncharted 4, as Hennig envisioned it, would introduce the world to Nathan Drake’s old partner, Sam. We hadn’t seen Sam in previous Uncharted games, because for fifteen years Nathan had thought he was dead, left behind during a Panamanian prison escape gone awry. In Hennig’s version of Uncharted 4, Sam would be one of the main villains, bitter toward Nathan for leaving him to die.
Over the course of the story, as Nathan tried to pull away from his roots as a treasure hunter, the player would find out that he and Sam were actually brothers. Eventually they’d heal their relationship and unify against the game’s real antagonist, a nasty thief named Rafe (voiced by the actor Alan Tudyk) who had served time with Sam in prison.
Some say the Uncharted 4 team didn’t get the staff and resources it needed to survive, because The Last of Us and Left Behind had vacuumed up so much of Naughty Dog’s attention. Others say that Amy Hennig had trouble making decisions and that the nascent game wasn’t shaping up very well. Some who were working on Uncharted 4 wished that there was a more cohesive direction. Others thought it was perfectly understandable, considering how small the Uncharted 4 staff was, that the game hadn’t coalesced yet.
Several people who have worked for Naughty Dog say Druckmann and Straley stopped seeing eye-to-eye with Hennig, and that they had fundamental disagreements on where to take the Uncharted series. When Hennig left, she signed a non-disparagement agreement with the studio that would prevent both her and Naughty Dog from making negative public comments about what had happened, according to people familiar with the arrangement.[/alert]
Source: Reddit
