Interview: Uncharted 3 - A new genre created

Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 02 November 2011 15:06

Opinion and Analysis

Keith Guerrette  - Lead Visual Effects Artist at Naughty Dog sat down with us to discuss the upcoming Uncharted 3: Drakes Deception, Guerrette explains a number of challenges the team faced during development, and how Uncharted has helped define a whole new gaming genre  of cinematic adventure.

 

Naughty dog has been showing off Uncharted 3: Drakes Deception for a short period now, and we started by asking how this new chapter in the continuing story of Nathan Drake is being received?

'It's been interesting ,' says Guerrette 'because it's been a lot of the same things we developed and pushed from Uncharted 2, people are really, really enjoying the fact that we have a strong cinematic presentation running through it, the way we tie the story into the game play back and forth.'

'We don't really remove the player from the action sequences,' says Guerrette 'most games struggle with the challenge of 'we have this really awesome thing we want to show, but we don't know how to do it with game-play', and that has been our biggest focus through the franchise, but with this game in particular we absolutely wanted to make sure the player was in control at all points.   When you are playing I think you will find that the only time you see a cinematic is for dialogue, because the dialogue during game-play is not that exciting, so when we want to show emotion and actually present story then we cut to cinematic, but anytime there is action, we make sure you stay in the game and stay in control.'

One way other developers have decided to treat those in-game cinematic moments is to use a technique called Quick Time Events.  The player is presented with a sequence of buttons to press in quick succession or within a short time frame as the on screen action plays out.

'Quick time events is something we have really tried hard to stay away from,' explains Guerrette 'in the first game we had a couple, and it was usually because we ran out of time to develop the [scenes] to not have quick time events, but still wanted you to have some sort of interaction.  But really if the player is about to have a rock drop on them, why not have the player actually roll away?  During the production of Uncharted 2 we spent a tremendous amount of energy on the engine side, hiring our programming staff to make sure we had the ability to build the train sequences, and we took almost the entire two years to get those two sequences to work, at the end of production we sat down and realised we had barely scratched the surface of what the technology could do.'

CONTINUED on PAGE 2