Creative lead Neil Druckmann told Rolling Stone:
"[Naughty Dog] We were conscious to have fewer fights, but it came more from a desire to have a different kind of pacing than to answer the "ludonarrative dissonance" argument.
Because we don't buy into it.
I've been trying to dissect it. Why is it that Uncharted triggers this argument, when Indiana Jones doesn't? Is it the number? It can't be just the number, because Indiana Jones kills more people than a normal person does. A normal person kills zero people. And Indiana Jones kills a dozen, at least, over the course of several movies. What about Star Wars? Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, are they some sort of serial killers? They laugh off having killed some stormtroopers. And in The Force Awakens, we see that a stormtrooper can actually repent for the person he is and come around, and there are actually real people under those helmets.
It's a stylized reality where the conflicts are lighter, where death doesn't have the same weight. We're not trying to make a statement about Third World mercenaries, or the toll of having killed hundreds of people in your life."
(...)