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Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, the 2016 action-adventure from Naughty Dog, almost had a stamina bar.
When its hero, Nathan Drake, was climbing, this bar would pop up and govern his progress. This is reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In that game, Link could scale even the most sheer surface, so long as he had the required stamina.
Josh Scherr—who co-wrote the game, along with the director, Neil Druckmann—spoke about the mechanic on YouTube channel Couch Soup (via Eurogamer):
“A lot of the stuff that happens early on are prototypes of design things that eventually make it in. We were looking to do some interesting things with the climbing mechanics… the long story short version of that is that we did all these interesting things with a stamina bar, trying to make it feel more challenging.”
Eventually, the idea got scrapped, because the team felt it upset the balance of play:
“We didn’t want to have people paying attention to stamina while they were also outrunning people shooting and all that kind of stuff. We wanted to keep everything quick and moving along.”
In that spirit, what did end up in the game was the grappling hook, which was excellent. In VideoGamer’s review of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Steve Burns said:
“It’s a confident, assured, and rather more intelligent game than it first appears, and a strong end to the series.”
Quite right, too.
