Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves – how PS5 improves upon a last-gen masterpiece

When Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End was first revealed during E3 2014, Naughty Dog presented a stunning teaser trailer featuring Nathan Drake waking on a beach… the detail was unprecedented and astonishingly, it was running at 60 frames per second. Of course, that 60fps dream never came to pass – beyond multiplayer mode – but 30fps was just fine, bearing in mind the quality of the final game. That said, we were left wondering what might have been. Certainly, simulated 60fps gameplay using the game’s slow-motion mode looked absolutely beautiful – but now, thanks to PlayStation 5, it’s running at 60fps in real-time. Or 120fps, if you prefer.

Revisiting Uncharted 4 and its Lost Legacy spin-off – both remastered now for PlayStation 5 – reminds us of the sheer level of achievement delivered by Naughty Dog in the last generation. Both are impressively executed games that essentially perfect the cinematic action formula, delivering strong characterisation, stunning locations and exceptional set-pieces. Across the PS4 generation, the studio proved time and again that it had mastered the balancing act of delivering engrossing player agency within a tightly-defined cinematic experience.

So what does the Legacy of Thieves collection actually offer? Going into this project, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect: the trailers never made it clear whether there would be any changes or improvements to the core visuals, beyond resolution and frame-rate. After examining the game, however, I can confirm that there ARE some improvements and changes to the presentation, but the headline feature is the inclusion of different gameplay modes: quality, performance and performance plus.

Firstly, quality mode renders at a fixed 3840×2160 resolution with a frame-rate target of 30 frames per second. This is predictably the sharpest mode but the advantage in pixel count wasn’t as significant as I expected – Naughty Dog’s temporal super-sampling anti-aliasing really is very good, while its post-process-heavy aesthetic doesn’t rely on super-intricate pixel detail. Performance? It’s essentially a flawless 30 frames per second presentation, with unerringly even frame-pacing.