Uncharted 4 delayed to April release date

A thief’s end will come a little later than expected, as Naughty Dog and Sony have announced a slight delay to Nathan Drake’s next adventure.

Writing on the PlayStation Blog, Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley announced that Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End has been pushed from its March release to April 26, 2016 on the PlayStation 4. The game had previously been delayed from 2015 into next year.

“This is our largest Uncharted game to date, and the team has been working incredibly hard to meet the challenge of closing out the game’s development in a timely manner,” Druckmann and Straley write. “However, as we approached our final deadlines and started wrapping up the game’s levels, we realized that several key sequences needed extra resources to bring them to the finish line. “

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The delay pattern happens to closely follow the release of Naughty Dog’s last acclaimed game, The Last of Us. That game was delayed by slightly more than a month from a May release to a June debut in 2013.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception released for the PlayStation 3 in 2011. Druckmann and Straley call the upcoming sequel, which recently had a multiplayer beta, “the most ambitious installment in the Uncharted series,” citing the extra time as necessary to properly polish the game.