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Although the PS4 launched with a few exciting exclusive properties like Infamous and Killzone back in 2013, the powerful machine is still waiting for a real console-selling franchise installment to arrive. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is expected to fill that void in 2016 three years into the console life-cycle, but the game looks like it will be well worth the wait. After an epic E3 gameplay demo, Uncharted 4 looks like it will be one of the first games to truly hardness the power of the PS4.

After a few years of ports and remasters, E3 2015 finally started to hint at the true arrival of the current-gen experience. Lots of games arriving in later 2015 and 2016 look leaps and bounds better than what we've seen so far and although graphics aren't everything, many consumers are looking forward to playing games that actually feel like they use the power of the PS4 and Xbox One. Naughty Dog pushed the envelope with The Last of Us at the end of the previous console generation and it looks like the developer is back at it again with the Unchartered 4 cinematic story-telling experience.

During an interview on PlayStation's Conversations with Creators, Uncharted 4's co-lead designer Anthony Newman detailed some of the ambitious plans to make the Uncharted narrative as seamless as possible to maintain immersion in Drake's world...

"We're actually doing real-time cutscenes in Uncharted 4, which is a new step for us. You're not going to see those black bars that we used to have in between gameplay and cutscenes. That's going to let us be so much more expressive and really get that seamlessness between the storytelling and the gameplay. Which we already do very well, but it's going to allow us to take it to that next level.

"That super great-looking Nathan Drake that's in the cutscenes--that's going to be the guy you have the whole time. The lighting model is nearly identical. All of that emotion you get across in the cutscenes, you'll have in gameplay all the time."

Gamers have seen Naughty Dog come close to a real-time experience in previous Uncharted games and in The Last of Us and Crystal Dynamics also came close in Tomb Raider, but all of those games still fell back on traditional cutscenes for any lengthy narrative scenes. If Uncharted 4 launches with a seamless narrative experience that isn't full of bugs (like so many recent broken releases), it will immediately offer something that very few games of its size have before.

Obviously Uncharted 4's gameplay and mechanics will be crucial to the game's success as well, but from what we've seen so far in the action-packed E3 demo, the game will likely deliver on that front. Naughty Dog hinted earlier that Uncharted 4 would have the most realistic character models that the studio has ever produced and we look forward to seeing those same realistic characters in both gameplay and cutscenes.

Are you excited for the cutscenes in Uncharted 4 or are you just concerned with the gameplay? Do you think it will be one of the first games to set the bar for current-gen quality? Let us know in the comments.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is set for release some time in 2016 exclusively for the PlayStation 4.