Sony Interactive Entertainment's Uncharted franchise has amassed quite a dedicated playbase in the time since its first installment, the PlayStation 3 title Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, released in 2007. Ten years later, the studio is gearing up to launch the fifth core Uncharted game and the ninth overall, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. With the launch date less than a week away, Sony has unveiled a brand-new trailer that explains how The Lost Legacy takes Uncharted to new heights and where the franchise can go from here.

The trailer centers around Uncharted: The Lost Legacy creative director Shaun Escayg, game director Kurt Margenau, and co-writer Josh Scherr speaking about the forthcoming title and showing off some impressive visuals, sharp gameplay, and immersive cutscenes. "We're always trying to do something new. We're always building on our technology. We're always pushing what our technology can do," Escayg says as footage of lush landscapes roll on the screen behind him.

Scheer piggybacks off these sentiments, getting specific in mentioning the game's expansive new location, the Western Ghats, which is the largest Uncharted map in the series' history. "The goal with the Western Ghats area was to create more choices than we ever had before," explains Scheer.

According to Escayg, players can choose wherever they want to go, at whatever time they want to go there, and can pick how they want to approach their combat within the Western Ghats. The map's massive size and large, open spaces grant the opportunity to advance from any angle or even skip certain encounters completely. This was something Margenau states was an "exciting challenge" for the studio to try, as the developers and designers were attempting "to build something in a nonlinear way."

Scheer then jumped back into the conversation, touching on The Lost Legacy's new heroes, Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross. Uncharted fans will recognize the duo from previous installments – with Chloe appearing in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception and Nadine popping up as the antagonist in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, but in The Lost Legacy, they're front and center. Ensuring that the protagonists' relationship was accurately played out in particular spots on the Western Ghats map was something the studio was super aware of. "We had to make sure that whenever you got to a certain area, depending on where Chloe and Nadine were in their relationship, in a lot of areas there are three different versions of the dialogue and not just saying the same things regardless of how they get there.

chloe frazer uncharted the lost legacy

It's clear to see that The Lost Legacy has brought a ton of freshness to the Uncharted franchise, a trend the minds behind the title hope continues on for the foreseeable future. For Escayg's part, he doesn't "feel like the world's done yet," especially given the vast amount of characters present in the Uncharted universe. "I think there's such a great cast of thieves, hustlers, warmongers in this world. I think there is a lot to choose from," Escayg offers in the video, perhaps hinting at the types of protagonists down-the-line titles will feature. Margenau wraps up the trailer by stating, "We've shown a little bit, just a little bit of what we have, and I think people are going to be pretty excited."

The comments made in this new trailer almost exactly echo remarks Scheer made a few weeks ago. Speaking with the outlet VentureBeat, Scheer admitted that The Lost Legacy could spin off into a new series, serve as a launching pad for upcoming Uncharted entries. Everything considered, it certainly sounds like Chloe and Nadine could carry the torch from original series star Nathan Drake and take the lead on a new Uncharted era.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy releases in North America on August 22, and in Europe on August 23, exclusively for PlayStation 4.