"[We] weren't comfortable having it in our game."
Creative director Neil Druckmann talked about the decision to remove the overweight Drake from the series with Uncharted 4 (via GamesRadar). He said that he "didn't want to have a laugh at someone's expense."
"I thought we'd matured beyond that," he added. However, he did mention that work on the character model had been finished.
"We actually had the whole thing modelled and in there... [The team] decided to make the call not do it," he explained. "[We] had a big debate about it and kind of approached it from all kinds of angles and decided we weren't comfortable having it in our game."
Donut Drake had appeared in each of the three mainline Uncharted games. He was a playable skin in the single-player of all three entries and then featured as part of the multiplayer in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception.