In a Q&A session conducted at MetroCon, Nolan North was questioned regarding Amy Hennig’s departure from Naughty Dog and the changes made to Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End from that point onwards. North’s response was quite revelatory, as this is possibly the very first time someone has addressed the matter head-on and gone in detail about Hennig’s sudden departure as well as the game’s status at the time.

A text excerpt from the Q&A video can be seen below:

Q: With Amy Hennig leaving, did they change the script at all to Uncharted 4?

NN: Yeah. I can’t really say too much about that…but I will. We had shot 8 months of her story and it was all thrown away. The Last of Us guys came in, and you have to understand, new producers, new people, they want to do it. I don’t know what happened exactly. Amy is still a very dear friend of mine and she’s brilliant but the Last of Us guys were the next team there so they took over and they just wanted their own flavour. They got rid of some of the other people that were involved and just redid their thing. Great move they made with Troy Baker [who] played my brother and they knew that was going to work because Troy and I are friends and he had done Joel and they knew he and I had good rapport. So it’ll be fun, the tone I think is gonna be slightly different. It has to be, you know, you can’t have a Robert Ludlum novel that’s going to be the same as Steven King. It’s just that they’re different styles. But it’s true to the story.

Q: So it really hasn’t affected it at all?

NN: No, it’s going to be along the same lines with the story but I think there’ll be…I don’t know. I don’t know how it’ll affect the how thing and to be honest I am just as curious as everyone to see what the final product will look like. I do know there’s trust with the Naughty Dog designers and programmers, that place is still top notch and from the things I’ve seen and sound and all the stuff they’ve done, it’s amazing.

[...]

It’s gonna be phenomenal. I mean the story, visuals, the same wacky crew.

Alternatively, you can also watch the entire Q&A panel here:

North goes on to discuss Amy Hennig’s future project at Visceral Games, which is said to be a Star Wars game that is in the same vein as Uncharted in terms of gameplay.

If you’re a big fan of Amy Hennig with her styles of stories, the big thing bout her is that she’s gone to EA and is going to reboot a brand new Star Wars franchise in the style of Uncharted and I happen to know a lot about it and it’s gonna be awesome.

Would Amy Hennig’s contribution have been valuable for Uncharted 4? Or was starting from scratch the right thing to do for Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley?

 

The last of us guys took over so I'm okay with that.

Since she left it makes some sense that they started from scratch. But I'm guessing they probably kept some things the same.

They did well in capturing her flavour! Because the exchange between Sully and Nathan during the demo was classic Uncharted.

Good because honest i have no idea what Uncharteds story was ever about, if there is any.

Not like in TloU, i loved it,

I wonder if the people who used to complain seriously about how another major game series would scrap ideas and restart during development are going to come here and complain about this?

Well, I don't think development restarted because of this.  Certainly, they rewrote the script/story, but it's unlikely the game assets themselves were tossed.

Crazy. Sounds brutal. But I think it will end up being for the best. Bruce and Neil are brilliant.

Of note, they were on board for U2 and it was incredible. U3 was a major letdown, then we find out later those 2 never worked on it bc they were doing TLoU.