Uncharted 4 almost got killed at year three. A guy from another Naughty Dog team played it and said "this game sucks" in front of the room. Corporate threatened to pull funding. The original creative lead walked out. Two new directors took over and threw out eight months of finished story to start again. 200 people worked on this game every day for five years. On PS4, Drake's face had 1,200 individual moving parts. The PS3 version had 250. They built him 800 different facial expressions. The third game had 120. His climbing animations alone took up more space than everything else Drake could do in the previous game combined. The game has about 1,000 little story scenes that play between the action. One single animator made 120 of them. The whole main game runs about 15 hours. Some of the work was strange. Drake's chest hair moves in the wind because someone realized the grass animation code worked on hair too. They left it in. Animators went to a climbing gym to figure out how a person shifts weight on different ledges. In the game, Drake's fingers come together on small handholds, and his whole body shakes when he's reaching too far. Climbers do that. The cost was real people. The team pulled 12-hour-plus days through the final stretch. After the game shipped, 14 of the 20 designers below team-lead level quit. The game director took extended time off and never came back to the studio. He said he would never make another Uncharted 4 because they had "lived through that." The game sold 18 million copies. It still has an average review score of 93 out of 100, ten years later. Clips of the gameplay still get compared favorably to PS5 games launching right now. That kind of polish is what 200 people grinding for five years on one project buys you. 70% of the design team walked out after launch.