Anecdotally ND still has a very lean development pace, but Uncharted 4 throws everything outta whack in terms of their analysing their timeline for the simple reason we don't know many things out of Amy Hennig's Uncharted was scrapped/kept to make A Thief's End.
What we know of Uncharted 4's development:
- At least 8 months of mocap work wasted
- Development went back to pre-production as characters are recasted/story rewitten.
- Components from previous version remain, such as Nate's brother & pirate theme.
- Pacing was a key component reworked, as Neil/Bruce cited that as one key thing changed from Amy Hennig's version where they said the old version had some maps so big it affected pacing
- Vertical slice only came together around PSX, almost didn't make deadline.
If vertical slice was completed as of Nov/Dec 2016, that means from vertical slice to full-game readiness for Uncharted 4 was
15 months of development.
IF, and I mean
IF as some sort of bible for ND's development pipeline, then fall 2018 is definitely the earliest we can expect TLoU Part II as per the timeline table I made:
Granted, it's game development so nothing goes as planned and we have no effing clue how different things will be from one game to the other. Will TLoU Part II be the same or different due to the nature of the game being different? How ready/baked are the current gameplay ideas? How will Bruce not being there impact potential development?
So many moving parts.