E3 2011 Feature: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception Developer Interview

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It's fair to say that Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is an anticipated title - perhaps the most anticipated title upcoming on the PlayStation 3. It's a big responsibility developing a sequel to the magnum opus that was Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, but the folks at Naughty Dog are pretty confident they have it in the bag. Co-Lead Game Designer Richard Lemarchand was able to talk to us at the SCEE booth at E3 about their latest project, and how both the single player and the multiplayer are evolving to keep players on their toes.

PALGN:Thanks once again for agreeing to let us interview you! I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. We've actually just been having a bit of a go on the multiplayer, so could you perhaps tell us a bit about the new features you guys are bringing to that?
Lemarchand: Thanks, it's really great to be talking to you this morning. We're really excited to be showing Uncharted 3 at E3 this year, we've waited a long time to unveil some of these features. And yeah, we're sitting right in front of our multiplayer here which we revealed a month or two ago, and which we're now showing a ton of new content for. We're really excited about the new multiplayer aspect of Uncharted 3.



We, of course, made our first multiplayer game in a few years with Uncharted 2, and we're really happy with the response we got. We still have a big, healthy, active player base who still play every week, or every day in some cases, and we're just building on that success. We've refined the core mechanics a lot, we've built lots of new play types, including six competitive modes and three co-operative modes, and we've added a ton of new features.


PALGN: So can you tell us a little more about these new modes, for instance the competitive ones?
Lemarchand: Yeah, we've been cooking them up for a long time. We started work on the Uncharted 3 multiplayer pretty much before we'd finished Uncharted 2. Because we play test the game in the office every single day, we were able to immediately start adding new stuff in, and we'd really just try stuff out, just like we ran the labs with Uncharted 2 where we would dynamically try different content out over time and film the reactions the players had, we did the same thing internally.

Of course, we have a team deathmatch again, which is kind of our backbone. We've invented a thing called '3 Team Deathmatch' which is two against two against two, and you have three pairs of buddies trying to take each other out. And we've found that this is really good fun, and it's allowed us to add some features like spawning on your buddy to get you right back into the thick of combat, and little rewards when buddies co-operate together. One of my favourites is if two buddies take down an enemy together, they can do like a high five or a fist bump over the body to get extra cash at the end of the match.

PALGN: Nice, nice. Moving on to the single player - this is the third instalment in the series. Are you treating Uncharted 3 as the climactic third part of a trilogy, or are you intending for each chapter to be its own thing, sort of like Indiana Jones?
Lemarchand: Yes, it's much more like we treat each game as its own thing. It's very important to us that players are able to come to each game and enjoy it in its own right. There is, however, something of an overreaching story arc - we're very interested in developing Nathan Drake and the other characters around him all the time. So yeah, it's kind of the best of both worlds for us.

PALGN: We've seen some new environments from the footage released so far - some more desert-y environments that perhaps we've seen before. Has it been quite a challenge to develop new technologies or methods to handle all this?
Lemarchand: Yeah, definitely. With each game we always have to develop with both sides of our brains at once. We went from lush jungle environments and water in Drake's Fortune to tackling ice and snow in Uncharted 2. So yeah, to do sand and dust and dust storms and fire demanded that we find a way to create a bunch of new technologies and that we think about our story in new ways. However, us being Naughty Dog, we always like to set ourselves a good challenge.

Actually, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception takes place in a vast variety of locations, I think more diverse environments than we've had previously in any Naughty Dog game. We end up in the desert, but on the way we travel through the streets of London, we visit a ruined French chateau in the heart of a forest, and we travel to other locations in the Middle East as well. In the course of doing that, we've completely re-invented our dynamic water simulations and also touched up a lot of our other technologies. So yeah, it's really been a lot of good fun and it's definitely been a challenge to get to where we're going, but I think that Uncharted 3 is really going to be the most impressive game Naughty Dog has produced so far.

PALGN: We've noticed that Uncharted 3 has a 3D mode. Does supporting this feature require you to rethink some of the game's development to take 3D into consideration?
Lemarchand: Absolutely. We set out to make Uncharted 3 a 3D stereoscopic game from the very beginning of development. That was very important to us, we couldn't have done it otherwise. When you think about it, you're rendering frames for both the left and the right eyes to create the 3D effect, so you might think that the PS3 has to do twice as much work, and famously we were already using a fair amount of the Cell processor's power when we made Uncharted 2.

But the genius programmers at Naughty Dog have been hard at work and we're very pleased with the results we're getting out of stereoscopic 3D. It's actually helped us in a number of ways, not only has it allowed us to get great looking 3D that runs at a good framerate, it also allows us to implement something else that we're really excited about which is a split screen mode, which is something that's gonna be great for us in a multiplayer sense, both for the co-op and competitive games. The same technology that allows us to essentially render every frame of the game twice has also allowed us to put two screens side by side on the TV.

Actually, one last feature that I want to mention in relation to that - you know when you go around to a mate's house and you're playing split-screen, and they're logged in with their PSN ID? Well they're earning cash for their character, but we've created a system where both of you can log-in with your PSN IDs and you can both earn cash, that you can then access when you go home. So we're literally just bursting with features with this game, there's so much we're excited about.

PALGN: Alright, so in that case if there's one new feature or aspect of Uncharted 3 that you think gamers should be most excited for, what would you say it is?
Lemarchand: Well, we've expanded Nathan Drake's combat abilities for Uncharted 3. We've given him some new stealth moves and we've expanded the melee combat a ton. So, some new moves, some new mechanics and some new environmental interactions as well, such as snatching up a bottle to smash someone over the head with in a bar brawl, which is really good fun. That aspect is such a great part of the atmosphere, of that pulpy action adventure world which Uncharted takes place in.

But, I think one of the things I'm most excited about relates to the cinematic storytelling that we're doing in Uncharted 3. Of course, that's our main goal with the Uncharted series is to create a playable cinematic experience that is every bit as good in every detail as the kind of action adventure movies we grew up enjoying. So, we're taking things in a little bit of a new direction, the new main antagonist is a woman named Catherine Marlot. She's a British woman who's the head of a secretive order, whose roots stretch all the way back through history, as far back in fact as Sir Francis Drake, Nathan Drake's alleged ancestor. And, as well as using the kind of brute force, physical tactics that Nathan's past enemies have used, she also uses more of an arsenal of psychological warfare tactics. She's the kind of person who manipulates her enemies by playing with their minds, and that's allowing us to take the story in some creepy, sinister new directions. And I think that's something people are really going to enjoy.

PALGN: Fantastic! Well, thanks once again for taking the time to talk with us during the chaos that is E3.
Lemarchand: It's a pleasure, thanks for having me today!

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