Just to be clear, the text below contains character spoilers for Uncharted 4: A Thief's End! If you haven't played the epilogue, seen the PSX trailer, and/or want to play it completely unspoiled, we recommend you stop here!
Naughty Dog has rightly been praised for their work in introducing increasing numbers of strong female characters into their games, but it seems that not everybody is happy about the move.
In Glixel's interview with Neil Druckmann, the game's co-director, the Israeli-American explained how one of their focus testers reacted to certain scenes.
We'll once again warn against spoilers here. Last chance, people!
Glixel asked: "You've said in the past that you've been influenced by Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency videos and the larger conversation about diversity and representation in games. How did that affect Uncharted 4?"
To which Druckmann responded: "When I'm introducing and describing a new character to our lead character concept artist, constantly she will ask, "What if it was a girl?" And I'm like, Oh, I didn't think about that. Let me think, does that affect or change anything? No? Cool, that's different. Yeah, let's do it."
"Initially, in the epilogue, it was Nate's son. Something similar happened with the mansion they go into. That was an old English guy's house. She asked: Well, what if it was a woman?"
"You have some sexist focus testers who were really upset by Nadine beating up Nate, and really upset at the end when it was Nate's daughter. To the point where we had to ask one guy to leave. In his core, it just affected him. He was cursing, "Not you too, Naughty Dog! Goddammit. I guess I'm done with Uncharted, if you guys ever make another one, with his daughter. This fucking bullshit."
"And I was like, Wow, why does that matter?"
Quite.