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BETA | INTERVIEW: NAUGHTY DOG
Uncharted 3’s windswept environments will also play host to a significant multiplayer overhaul
How important is multiplayer to Uncharted 3, and how have you managed to tie multiplayer in with the feeling of a narrative experience? Multiplayer is a huge emphasis for us on Uncharted 3. We want to expand on everything that we did on Uncharted 2 and add to it all the features that the best online experiences out there have and then some. Another thing we really want to leverage is the uniqueness of our move set that allows players to climb and traverse their environment like no other game out there. Finally we are going to bring the cinematic set piece moments you get from the single player experience and bring them into our online modes. By the time Uncharted 3 is released, many of your staff will have presumably worked solidly on the franchise for six years. How
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do you inspire your team under such circumstances, and stop people becoming uninspired or desensitised? That’s obviously a very important issue that we tackle in a number of ways. The biggest thing we do is continue to challenge ourselves. We constantly push the technology so that everyone can attempt new things with our engine that nobody has ever seen before. The whole team at Naughty Dog loves wrestling with technical problems and then coming up with creative solutions. Which is why the Uncharted franchise is such a rich universe to play in. We can let Nate travel to the far corners of the world to tackle just about any kind of environment imaginable and delve into historic architecture that keeps the team inspired. On a similar note, how have you approached the creative challenge of
keeping the series feeling fresh without straying too far from the character that defines it as an Uncharted game? Like I was just saying, it’s pretty easy to do in the Uncharted universe since there are so many ancient civilizations to tap into which span the entire globe. But the thing that we can rely on to keep things the most fresh is the story. Since the characters and their relationships are such a huge part of what defines Uncharted, the action that’s taking place is really just an excuse or a setting for the story that’s being told. Drake is more complicated than your typical one dimensional game hero, and by introducing new characters, or diving deeper into the relationships of past characters, you get to see new facets of what makes him tick. If we get that side of things right, the multiplayer, and technology we should be in good shape.