The timing for this is insane, i've replayed the game after years this very week and was over with it yesterday, on Chapter 5 of TLL right now.
Still by far my favorite controlling third person game in existence, motion matching and responsiveness here are at an absolute peak and vastly superior to TLOUII for some reason. It plays like a dream and animations are literal perfection.
Story is great and same for the script, some sequences like the auction are just mindblowingly good in their direction, Rafe is an utterly amazing villain and Nadine also works most of the time, incredible performances from every single member of the cast.
Sure, the game would have benefited from being a shorter, more condensed and replayable experience like the previous ones, but i feel ND were terrified by The Order: 1886 reviews so tried to distanciate themselves as much as possible from it, and in the end, being the last Drake adventure (hopefully not) i can't complain for more playtime with him.
Graphically, it's still the most inconsistent game i've ever played. The HDR, tone mapping, color grading, all make for a visually stunning presentation that made me appreaciate my plasma more than ever. But if most of the time it's a damn straight pre-rendered movie (especially thanks to their GI solution and God tier PBR and SSS) and therefore the best looking game i've seen to this day along with The Order, TLOUII and P.T., too many times in the open areas it shamelessly shows bordeline N64 geometry, with awful use of normal maps or texture in general to mitigate it.
It is known that ND textures are all hand painted but while the artistry and resolution is more than commendable, they were over confident here. It's like they didn't care, they had their perfect lighting, characters, animations, vegetation, AO, Temporal AA and all the little technical feats and thought they could afford old gen shapes with cartoony textures on top (climbable edges, for instance) because the thing would have looked great regardless due to the "paintery" style and their tech pipeline. And they were wrong, because it's super jarring to have photorealistic characters, vegetation and lighting in the same frame of sharp edges and low poly mountains on the horizon.
Luckily this is mostly true for the more open areas, which are not common, but playing The Lost Legacy made it clear that they received this same feedback from more than one person because most of these issues are completely solved in the "DLC". A night and day difference.
Now they just HAVE to release a PS5 patch for both U4 and TLL.
A remaster is out of question, like Bluepoint shown Naughty Dog games just can't be remastered without downgrading things here and there, it would be an absolutely momumental task to even just deal with the literally thousands of assets/textures, and since picture quality is unbeatable as is (not referring to IQ) a remaster would either look the same and have people complain or look worse, because you can't improve on what's shown here.
Upgrading geometry would be impossible because that's how they designed this massive game, so just unlock the framerate and if possible increase the resolution. They could introduce self shadowing hair and that would be awesome, but it's extremely unlikely.
If there's just one thing i'd like to see changed BAD however, and was due to technical limitations, would be to reintroduce their absolutely mindblowing and still unbeaten volumetric shadows on water into Chapter 17.
Or at the very least the downgraded version of them seen in TLL, just let me part with those awful pixelated shadows in Chapter 17, please..