This post contains MAJOR Uncharted 4: A Thief's End story spoilers.

Before the release of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Naughty Dog developers talked about how the events of that game would make it difficult for Nathan Drake to star in a new entry in the series. This, combined with the game's ominous-sounding title, may have led some fans to believe Drake would not survive.

Drake does survive. Now, director Neil Druckmann has revealed Naughty Dog never had any intention of killing off the franchise hero in part because it wouldn't have worked with the franchise's tone.

"It felt like Nathan Drake didn't have too many places left to go," Druckmann said on a recent Writers Guild of America podcast. "How do we wrap it up in this definitive way while still maintaining the tone of the series? A lot of the times, when you say it's the last one, people go, 'Oh, you're going to kill him.' That's one way to make it definitive."

Druckmann added that keeping Drake's fate ambiguous in press interviews and official marketing assets was a way to "throw people off." But killing the beloved character was never in the cards.

"We pretty early on decided that, tonally, [killing Drake] wouldn't be right for this kind of lighthearted pulp action-adventure series," he said.

Druckmann appears on the WGA podcast with Breaking Bad, X-Files,and Better Call Saul writer Gennifer Hutchinson, each sharing their own illuminating perspectives on storytelling. Listen to it here.

Uncharted 4 is the final entry in the series to star Drake and the last one developed by Naughty Dog. There could be a fifth mainline Uncharted game with another developer and presumably a new hero, however.

In other news about the Uncharted franchise, it was recently announced that Bad Boys 3 director Joe Carnahan is attached to write the Uncharted film's script.