Only Parts of the Game Are Playable in First-Person, According to the Modder
Recently, an Uncharted 4 video made by a PS4 modder showed an early scene of the game that’s between the game’s protagonist Nathan Drake & his wife Elena but in first-person. Earlier this week, the modder, known on YouTube as “Thekempy“, explained to COGconnected in an interview how he was able to pull this off.
“I was playing around with a moveable camera in Uncharted 4 one day (made available by re-activating certain leftover developer commands in the game) and tried positioning it inside Nathan Drake’s head during the cutscene with Elena in chapter 4,” explained Thekempy, whose real name is Michael Kemp. “I noticed that if I moved it around inside his head that it actually started to look like I was watching the cutscene in first person. I played around with matching the timing of his head movements and it ended up looking pretty convincing!”
However, when asked if the entirety of Uncharted 4 was playable in first-person, Kemp told COGconnected that because of how the game’s camera controlled, the first-person mode “isn’t much use outside of certain cutscenes and a select few gameplay sequences.”
“The camera is controlled using the PS4 controller and I have to try to control both the camera and the player at the same time,” Kemp said. “So if I start moving Nathan Drake around, all of a sudden the camera goes all out of whack too, and I sadly don’t have the ability to tell it to stay locked to the same position of his head.”
“However, if I am controlling the character while he is in a vehicle (either driving the Jeep or sitting on the back of Sam’s bike) the camera does seem to lock itself to the position of those vehicles,” Kemp further explained. “So I could recreate parts of the truck escape sequence by placing the camera inside Nathan’s head and it would keep up with him on the bike automatically.”
“Outside of specific moments like that, there isn’t much more that can be done,” added Kemp.
So, can any PS4 owner mod the game like this? Well, according to Kemp, modding on the PS4 is “not for everyone, as it requires having the right hardware and the right know-how, but maybe in the future it will become more commonplace.”
“PS4 modding has really only been made possible within the past six months or so,” Kemp said. “Methods were found in older PS4 firmwares that allow certain exploits to be run, which in turn allows for game data to be messed with and changed. It is still very much an enthusiasts playground, and there are a lot of steps involved to get it set up.”
When asked about continuing to mod Uncharted 4 into first-person, Kemp told COGconnected said that the Nate & Elena scene and a recently uploaded story trailer were as far as he could go “due to the limitations of the camera”.
“I have done a variety of mods to Uncharted 4 since the start of the year, sharing my progress on YouTube as I go, and while I don’t have anything else in the pipeline just yet,” Kemp said, he saw “way too much potential in Uncharted 4 for the modding to stop here!”