People forget, but Uncharted was taking from Bond, and Indiana Jones especially. Both are just taking back what's theirs to begin with.
Naughty dog no secret of uncharted being "modernised" version of Indiana jones, as for the bond reference, I did not notice that at all when playing through uncharted 1-3 around their release dates but if we're really stretching the influence, the duck tales comics that inspired Indiana jones is where it's all going back to, I liked uncharted 2 a lot at the time of it's release but whenever the soundtrack beat you over the head with "just like Indiana Jones, right?, RIGHT!?" orchestral cues it was too on the nose and was kind of annoying.
I did observe though, that most people that thought Uncharted was the be all and end all of action games at the time of release, did not play prince of persia, resident evil 4 and gears of war, to be fair you needed a GameCube, Xbox 360 and a ps2 for all that, which most did not have or played just one of them. If someone played none of these three games, Uncharted seemed like the most unique game ever made, but if you did play all of those, Uncharted was 100% derivative in pretty much every way. I recall any games that tried too hard to ape other games back then got buried by critics, but not Uncharted, that got a free pass from critics, these critics were only too aware its a mash of three games with an Indiana jones coat on it but still applauded. Jak 2 aped the vehicle and city map from GTA but was otherwise a wholly unique game, same for 3, mad max but wholly unique otherwise in terms of gameplay. For me at the time being a huge Jak fan, Uncharted was a step down, especially the first one. Jak 1 was essentially, what if mario 64 had a massive interconnected map instead of having to jump through portraits etc. I miss the old naughty dog
Irony: the original Hitman game was supposed to be James Bond game at one point, but they couldn't get the license.
They became their own dark and serious games because of this, they were extremely unique for the time and there's nothing quite like the hitman games, whereas they ran the risk of basically being a ps2 version of tomorrow never dies with license holders breathing down their necks, especially back then, they could have unreasonable demands for a game and it would turn out okay or be a rushed unpolished mess to meet the release of a movie as it was simply a tie in product in the eyes of marketers, putting the studio under in many cases. It's better they aren't doing a big budget bond game till now when they are a more trusted seasoned studio that can push back against license holders.
