Interviews// Naughty Dog on Uncharted 3

SPOnG: Do you think that’s how any future projects may evolve? Incremental graphical updates with a bigger focus on optimisation and under-the-hood stuff?

Justin Richmond: Well, the difference between Uncharted 1 and Uncharted 2 is enormous, right? This is what always happens. The first time you do anything on new hardware, you’re barely able to get it running in an attempt to get it out the door, and you’re just so happy that you did it.

That happened to us with Uncharted 1, and although making it was really awesome, behind the scenes it was just a mess. Everything’s really unoptimised, and so when it came to making Uncharted 2 we thought ‘okay, we’re lucky - we got this one done, it was great, but now let’s fix this.’

So between Uncharted 1 and Uncharted 2 we made this huge leap forward. We built all this technology that would allow us to render even more stuff and make the game look quite beautiful. That jump is only really possible once - for us, anyway. The way we made it, how much of the PS3’s power we were using... that huge gap that you saw between Uncharted 1 and 2 is the kind of thing that really only happens once per generation. We pushed it really hard.

Uncharted 3 isn’t just an incremental update - we did change lots and lots of things - but graphically speaking, it’s not going to have the same gap. It was never going to happen. Uncharted 2 to 3 is still a jump, but its a narrower jump. And going forward, it depends on what we do. There are always ways to improve stuff, always ways we can pull out more stops.

But I don’t think you’ll ever see that same jump again, at least on a PlayStation 3. There was just so much power left over in the PS3 when we made Uncharted 1, that we figured out how to use and really took it to town when developing Uncharted 2.


SPOnG: That ‘once-in-a-generation’ leap you mentioned - is that because you feel you’ve hit more of a technical ceiling on the PS3, or because you decided to look at under-the-hood improvements from a creative standpoint?

Justin Richmond: It’s a couple of things. Technically, it’s all about how much stuff you can do without lighting the machine on fire. And it’s about where we’re going to concentrate our time because of those factors. Rewriting the shader engine is something that we can control very easily and it helps the game look better.

But actually changing the fundamental architecture of how the engine works, that’s something we would hope to only do once per generation! That’s where you got that graphical leap from between Uncharted 1 and 2, we changed the engine to be so optimised that we could get so much on screen.

This gap, between Uncharted 2 and 3, comes from our other little tiny things - like changing optimisations, changing streaming animations, getting more polygons on screen, progressive mesh... but they’re not this same huge leap we made before.

When we made Uncharted 1 on the PS3, we knew that we had 70 per cent of the system’s power still left to go. We fixed that and ended up using 99 per cent with Uncharted 2! So the optimisation stuff... as long as we’re making PS3 games, that’s the sort of thing you can expect to see in terms of upgrades.


SPOnG: Because I remember when Uncharted 2 came out and you guys had said you used all of the PS3’s power...

Justin Richmond: Well, we did! That’s the thing - just because we’re using 100% of the power doesn’t mean we’re tapped out. We’re making these machines scream, right? We’re doing a crazy amount of stuff on it, but there’s always room to optimise; to go back and say, "Well, this could be faster."


SPOnG: The budget on Uncharted 3 must have been colossal this time around, especially in terms of the music production.

Justin Richmond: Yeah, the soundtrack’s amazing, and I think the budget for the sound was actually very similar to Uncharted 2.

Arne Meyer: It’s because we were using the same process - sure, we recorded at different locations, but it’s the same thing we did for Uncharted 2. Greg Evans writing it, orchestral recordings... instead of Skywalker Sound, we did some at Abbey Road, some in San Francisco...

Justin Richmond: But we have an amazing team at Sony who are also working with us. So, it’s the same process we’re using, but I think we’re getting better at it [laughs]. We’re able to get more out of the sound engine and stuff.

Arne Meyer: We tend to be pretty good with our budgets - very conservative, relatively speaking. We have a really small team, just enough people to do whatever we need to do - from the internal studio on the development side to the sound side. So, we’re not trying to expand things too quickly.


SPOnG: Does it blow your mind a little that your games these days are kind of matching movie budgets?

Justin Richmond: Yeah, it’s pretty crazy to be working on a project that is that expensive. But at the same time, I hate to say this, we don’t really think about it. We’re so intent on making the game in the right amount of time with the right amount of people. Fortunately we’re very lucky that [Naughty Dog co-presidents] Evan [Wells] and Christophe [Balestra] handle the budget-level stuff for us, that we don’t have to worry about things.

I mean, I can’t go up to them and ask for 500 designers every three days - I know that, the other leads know that - but we’re willing to do what it takes to get the game done. As Arne says, we’re very conservative and a very small team for what we do, and so we’re able to get away with a lot more.


SPOnG: There are obvious benefits to working with Sony on a project like this - do you get access to talent from Sony Pictures or any of the other divisions of the corporation?

Justin Richmond: There’s a couple of things that came out of that, actually. Sony Pictures is going to make the Uncharted movie, which is awesome. We have a movie studio backing that up which is amazing. But not only that, Sony Pictures was also able to secure us a sound stage, along with all the cameras...

Arne Meyer: They had a bunch of motion capture cameras sitting around, and they asked us, "You wanna use them?" We’re like, "Sure!" [laughs]

Justin Richmond: They had 200 motion capture cameras that were not quite good enough for movies any more, but they were totally great for video games and what we needed. So, they basically set us up with a complete rig and they even gave us room for offices as well. It’s an amazing ability to work with those guys.