Interviews// Naughty Dog on Uncharted 3

It's probably no secret that Naughty Dog has become one of the development darlings of the PlayStation 3.

With a long history of Sony console development behind it - right back to creating PSOne mascot Crash Bandicoot - people looked to PS3 launch title Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (reviewed here) with great interest.

What players saw was a blurring of the line between interactivity and cinematics; the feeling of actually being in an action adventure film, playing the role of lovable treasure hunter Nathan Drake. The success of the game has led to two sequels: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (reviewed here) - and Drake's Deception is already being hyped as one of the biggest games of 2011.

Amid all this madness and praise, Naughty Dog still appears to have its collective feet firmly on the ground. This was no better detailed than in my chat with Uncharted 3's game director Justin Richmond and community strategist Arne Meyer; two down-to-earth guys who aren't taking anything for granted.

Not even Uncharted 3's inevitable blockbuster success, it seems! Read on...


SPOnG: How relieved are you guys now to be finally getting Uncharted 3 out of the door?

Justin Richmond: It’s exciting, for sure. I mean, It’s always nice when you get to that last day and you realise it’s over! On the one side it’s nice to be done, on the other hand nobody’s reviewed it yet, so we’re still a bit tense as to how it’s going to be received on a public level! Very nerve-wracking.

Arne Meyer: It’s that moment where we feel that we’ve put together the best game we can possibly make, but then we really want to know what our fans have to say about it more than anything. And they don’t have their hands on it yet, so... we’re on the edge, a little bit.


SPOnG: Is there not an expectation though, after the success of Uncharted 1 and 2, that people will really like this one as well?

Justin Richmond: We like to think so. We’d like to think we’ve made a better game than we did the last time. But I think on the other hand Uncharted 2 was like a ‘lightning in a bottle’ scenario. You had all the right people making the right game at the right time, and the gaming industry wanted it. We won, like, every award ever... I mean, how many times can that happen in your life?

Seriously, I feel lucky that I got the work on that title at all, let alone getting to play it. I’m really proud of this game, I think we’ve made an amazing game that’s improved on a lot of stuff from Uncharted 2.

I’m fully prepared not to win a zillion awards again. That was really a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. I’d love to do it again! But regardless, I think the fans are going to love this game, the critics are going to love it... but in terms of awards and things? That’s just a luck thing, in some sense.

Arne Meyer: I think we have really high expectations for ourselves as a studio too. We knew that once we were done with Uncharted 2 we were going to have to think about improving on it for a sequel. And we were all thinking, 'Oh crap, how do we outdo ourselves?’ even before the first reviews came in. A month after we were done, which was about the time when the reviews started coming in, we had already started working on some of the gameplay sequences for Uncharted 3, so we were already trying to shoot for the moon... again!

Justin Richmond: Yep. We never do anything that isn’t a shot for the moon.


SPOnG: Literally shoot for the moon?

Justin Richmond: [Laughs] Drake in space is where we know we’ve gone too far!


SPOnG: But for every Uncharted game, you’ve tried to push yourselves to tackle the next environmental challenge. Sand and fire in Uncharted 3, for example. What is the next environmental challenge for you guys?

Justin Richmond: I don’t know. You can always make things look better, right? You can always do better than what you did last time. We did water in Uncharted 1 and we totally revisited that for this one.

So, there’s plenty of places for us left to go in that area of things. For us, it’s about telling a compelling story first, and then looking at where that takes you. You can always go back to an environment that you’ve done before and do it in a totally new and more interesting way.


SPOnG: I think about the only thing that could be levelled against Uncharted 3 is that it’s not the massive graphical leap in the same way that Uncharted 2 was over its predecessor. What kind of graphical and audio improvements have you guys made specifically, for those of us that don’t want to squint?

Justin Richmond: Our core systems are completely different and crazily complex and interesting. Our shaders were all completely rewritten so we could cram more data in there. Everything got optimised so we could put even more things on screen at the same time at a higher resolution. We improved our streaming system so we could load additional animations. We definitely didn’t sit still. Pretty much everything got touched - improved or optimised in some way.


SPOnG: I recognise some of these environments from Uncharted 2. Is that just a matter of circumstance because it’s all in the same world?

Justin Richmond: I don’t know, man. We’re pretty different. The first thing you do in the game is go to a city, which we’ve never done before.

The France stuff is completely different to anything we’ve ever done before... some of the levels might be similar in that you’re heading into a tomb or a crypt or something, but I don’t think we’re in any way copying what we’ve done before. Everything got redone, for sure. We’re not re-using any assets, let’s put it that way. It’d be a lot easier if we had [Laughs]!