Why We Shouldn’t Compare the Nathan Drake & Master Chief Collections

This week Sony officially revealed Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection after it was accidentatlly leaked on the PSN store. Bringing all three of the original Uncharted titles to the PS4 with updated graphics and on one disc is hugely ambitious project that should help pad Sony’s lackluster 2015 lineup.

Amazing as the announcement is, it’s bound to make a few gamers out there nervous after the failed launch of the Master Chief Collection. It could ultimate cause concern that the Nathan Drake Collection will prove to be too big of a project for any studio to do properly and lead to another disastrous launch.

Comparisons like that are exactly the type of thing we have to avoid when talking about the Nathan Drake Collection before and even after its release. Not only because this isn’t the Master Chief Collection but because making comparisions like those are exactly what makes studios afraid to innovate. There is no denying that the Master Chief Collection was riddled with problems at launch and for months afterwards. What’s also true is that it was created by four different studios updating games from two different console generations to work on a third.

Image courtesy of Xbox Wire

At the same time those studios were working with over a decade of coding written in a signature style that had to be deciphered, all before being shipped long before it was ready so it could make a splash during the holiday season. These are all mistakes that Sony and even Microsoft can look back on now and learn from to make future game series collections the success the Master Chief Collection could have been. This is something that the Nathan Drake Collection, being crafted by a single studio with games from only a single console generation ago, has a real shot at.

A better way to look at game collections is the Master Chief Collection was the proof of concept that showed it could be done and the Nathan Drake Collection will show us how amazing that is when it works. No matter what we should all get comfortable with the idea of remasters and huge collections like these because they probably won’t be the last of them we see.