Naughty Dog's Community Strategist Arne Meyer was asked about the absence of multiplayer in Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection following its EGX 2015 presentation.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception are the two which has multiplayer in the series, and fans were asking why Naughty Dog excluded it from the remastered version. Meyer explained the situation by stating that they planned it from the start, since they didn't want to affect the online population of those two games.

In addition to that, he said that they put everything they learned about multiplayer from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception into Uncharted 4: A Thief's End multiplayer.

“It was a really difficult decision for us, but it was one that we actually took early on, because we were thinking about both our player population – we still have players playing Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3 multiplayer, and we still haven’t shut those servers down; we don’t have a plan to do that right now – and so, we were like, did we want to affect that player population, and splinter it even more so."

“At the time, too, when we were talking with Bluepoint, and talking with our multiplayer team for Uncharted 4, we were saying, we learned a lot from Uncharted 2 and we really took it to the next level with Uncharted 3, so everything that we learned from that we were putting into Uncharted 4 multiplayer – so for us, it was like, why don’t we keep moving forward and progressing, rather than take a snapshot in time?”

Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection releases on October 7 exclusively for the PS4.