In case you have been holed up in a jungle fortress in Madagascar lately and missed the news; Naughty Dog teased a new installment to their highly successful Uncharted series at the PS4 launch event. At the moment it isn’t being called ‘Uncharted 4’; causing mass confusion and mild panic among fans. What does it all mean? Refresh your memory with the trailer below…

The lack of the number ‘4’ is not the only major point of discussion and debate. You will have noticed that the voice is not that of Nathan Drake; the handsome and charismatic (if slightly flaky) protagonist of previous titles. So who is he?

Several theories have been doing the rounds. The first is one that I was a an early ‘champion’ of; that the voice belong to one of Henry Every’s crew. I have written a history of Every here so you can check out why I believe Every is significant. As I said in that article; Every (a pirate of the late 17th century) spent much of his post-haul time trying to get away from his crew with as much money as he could. One can imagine why this might get on the nerves of the men that sailed with him. And clearly The Voice has some beef with the person he is directing his words towards. However, if it were indeed one of the pirates; the accent is all wrong. The accent would be English and not American.

This is also why I no longer believe The Voice to be that of Robert Drury. Drury was shipwrecked on Madagascar during the time of Henry Every’s extended Madagascan holiday. The words could well belong to Drury; they certainly fit his situation, but his accent would also not have been American. A follower on Twitter suggested that the accent wouldn’t necessarily signify anything if Naughty Dog decided to go down the Assassin’s Creedy type route and use artistic license. However, up until now Naughty Dog have used authentic accents (often delivered by voice actors whose natural accents are in fact different to their character’s) and I don’t believe they would alter that habit now. You can apply the rule of accents to eliminate Sir Francis Drake from the running, but as I have mentioned before; he died a century before it looks like this game is to be set.

So, as The Voice is that of an American, it is safe to assume that the he is in the present day. I know that several people believe that the game will be set (at least partially) in the past, but this theory certainly doesn’t necessarily back that idea up. I have heard people variously suggest that the speaker is a younger Victor Sullivan (an idea I do not subscribe to as we have already seen and heard a young Sully and he did not sound like that) or possibly Nathan Drake’s father. Again I am not convinced. We now know what happened early in Nate’s life and why he doesn’t hang out with his dad, so it is entirely possible that he is alive and well and holding a grudge against someone. I find it hard to believe that that person would be Nate; he barely knew him long enough to hold a grudge. I don’t believe it is Nathan’s dad but I don’t mind being proved wrong.

The Voice could therefore belong to a peer of Nathan. It is a lot easier to believe that one of his past associates might hold a grudge against him. Another Twitter follower suggested that it might be Dante from Uncharted; Golden Abyss, but I believe the time-frame would be incorrect. And again the accents give it away.

The final point I would like to make here is that it is entirely possible that The Voice is reading someone else’s words; much like the speech Nathan Drake gave in the Uncharted 3; Drake’s Deception teaser. So we could have any American male reading anyone’s words. Its not exactly a lot to go on, but right now I think the best guess is that someone that Nathan knows (be they friend or foe) is speaking the words of Robert Drury. Or one of Henry Every’s crew. Also; that would mean that Nathan Drake is in Uncharted on PlayStation 4. And that would be a big relief to many, myself included.