| Games - Console Gaming |
Discover how Uncharted 2 Among Thieves will thaw out the action adventure genre with its blend of kinetic action setpieces, believable characterisation and movie-style dialogue.
Drakes’ Fortune was more than just a name. The game cost a sweet $20 million to make. The bottom line is, Uncharted Drake’s Fortune was a milestone game for Sony’s bedfellow developer Naughty Dog. It represented a new direction for the design team, away from cute animals towards real world scenarios; it was seen internally as Naughty Dog’s new franchise for a new generation of gamers and it marked the moment the developer flushed away its bespoke development tools in favour of the Industry standard C++ programming language, so that other Sony teams could use their assets and vice versa.
Uncharted Scored highly across the board and a million sales didn’t harm things – it was fortune and glory for Naughty Dog. But the developer isn’t resting on its laurels for the sequel, Uncharted 2 Among Thieves. Though the $20 million cost of the original title included creating the game from scratch, its sequel will cost roughly the same – despite using an identical engine and tools. Naughty Dog wants their special Uncharted 2 to be better in every respect.
Cinematic experience
For a start Uncharted 2 will remain resolutely single-player, the cinematic experience of the original that ensured it was as much fun the third or fourth time around is back in a big way. Actor Nolan North, who brought a rag-tag comedic side to the Nathan Drake character, has returned to voice the hero. He visits the sound studio three times a month to record vocals, often ad-libbing dialogue to pre-played footage that’s later added to the scene. It’s the same system that ensured the original Uncharted felt so filmic. When Drake grasped hold of the map from the crashed plane in the first game and ushered the immortal line, “Sweet!” it always felt more natural than the laboured expositional monologues of games like Metal Gear Solid 4.
The script for Uncharted 2 has been worked on for some time, through many rewrites. As with the twist in the last third of Uncharted when Drake stumbled from duelling with gun-toting pirates to fending off Nazi zombies in the bowls of a World War 2 submarine bunker, Naughty Dog is promising another similar foray into fantasy for the sequel. The idea for the Uncharted series is that it treads the same thin line between the fantastical and what can be proved scientifically. Those mutants crawling in the shadows were distant offspring of generations of people infected by the virus released when Sir Francis Drake originally opened the mummy’s coffin – or were they Nazi zombies? It all depends on your own unique take on the scenario.
The Cintamani Stone
So the new game will blend real world actuality with fantasy. Set three years after the events of Drake’s Fortune, while hunting for the treasures of the court of Monogolian Emperor Kublai Kahn, lost with the final voyage of late 12th century explorer Marco Polo, Drake stumbles onto a more valuable mystery – the key to Shangri-La and the wish-fulfilling Cintamani Stone. The gist is, the Cintamani Stone is rumoured to be a giant sapphire that magically grants the wishes of anyone who possesses it, and as giant sapphires go, it’s worth billions.
Drake wants in.
The Script is straight out of Spielberg’s top drawer and this is why Naughty Dog spent so much on developing this aspect of the game. As well as the actors, every inch of Uncharted 2 is pawed over by the team of designers, artists and programmers at the studio. Every set piece is directed with care, even down to a tiny drop of water falling in the background. As with the original, the idea is to deliver a Hollywood experience, which also means there will be no loading times to break the game’s movie appeal. There will be no install either – the game will use the same unique system created for the first Uncharted whereby the game caches straight to your PS3’s hard drive as you play. Installs occur behind the scenes. As you play out one section, set piece mission, the next is being loaded in the background, seamlessly.
This is quite a feat when the game is seen running. The ‘traversal gunplay’, Naughty Dog’s new phrase for its mix of platform shooting, is more expensive than in the original. Whereas Drake could only shoot from certain positions in the original game, he can now pull off out a gun and take a potshot at any point in a level. Whether he’s running, swinging or climbing; hanging from a cliff-face or even climbing a rope, Drake can take a shot.
Traversal tricks
What’s more impressive is this mechanic is taken further; Drake can now perform all these actions while on moving objects. There will be moments in Uncharted 2 when you’ll be hanging from the back of a lorry, gun in hand, shooting at hired help. Naughty Dog has teased us journalists with the idea that at one stage in the game Drake will be leaping from truck to truck in a moving convoy, Indiana Jones style. There will also be a train chase in which you use the traversal gunplay to fight over and along a train as it careers to a very explosive end. It’s the concept of moving on moving things that should ensure Uncharted 2 feels like a significant improvement over the original game. Some of this style of play was shown of in a demo that featured Drake making his way through a nondescript war-torn city in Nepal. At one point Drake clambered onto a sign that read ‘Hotel El Dorado’, a neat reference to the events of the original game (Naughty Dog is placing hidden notes like this throughout the game for the fans to spot). As Drake made his way through the backstreets, inching across ledges and ducking behind burned out cars, the stealth gameplay came to the fore. Don’t fear though, Uncharted 2 isn’t Metal Gear Solid – this sequel is no more stealthy than the original, where you could choose to take out enemies with a quiet neck-snap or with a full-on frontal assasult. In the Nepal city fight, Drake bounded up streetlights, leapt from storefront to signpost to air conditioning unit; crawled up a fire escape, jumped across an alley then pulled a bewildered goon from a ledge unawares in a stealthy end to a very hectic combat section.
Climbing overhaul
What’s noticeable is that the climbing mechanic from Uncharted has been overhauled considerably for this sequel. There were moments in the original where the animation would unnaturally fill in gaps as Drake made a grab for a ledge or outcrop that was just too far from reach. In the sequel, the system has been spruced up to look and feel more natural. This partly due to environment being littered with areas to clamber on and jump from, but again, in a very natural way. Just as importantly, how Drake interacts with these objects makes the whole event more believable. For example, while hanging from the Hotel El Dorado’s sign and shooting, the sign becomes a makeshift piece of cover.
Once on the ground, Drake has some more moves at his disposal. The riot-shield carrying enemies he confronts in the Nepalese city can be tackled by first stomping on their shields to stun them, befor stealing the shields which becomes your cover while on the move. This sequel is set to be a lot more expansive too. While the original game neatly fitted its action onto a small island, this title will stretch Drake’s legs and see him flitting about the globe. The Nepal city is one mission, a gritty environment at odds with the colourful greenery of the first game. However other locations will span dark underground tunnels, sweltering swamps, stark blue ice caverns as well as the lush green jungle familiar to players dusting down their boots from Drake’s first adventure. The colour palette, design and tone of this sequel is quite varied. This could be both original game lent the adventure a taught movie quality, with just enough variety to keep you hooked, but not so much as to swamp the plot and characterisation. The core gunplay and controls have been refined too, with Sixaxis control being completely ditched. Where before you could hurl grenades using Sixaxis to direct the arc of the throw; you now just press a face button and drake lobs an explosive in the direction of the crosshair. The upshot is Drake can now throw a grenade without the irksome animation of putting his gun away first.
Disclaimer: When asked about the Multiplayer mode the developers said that they released the beta to test the waters. However, there is a big possibility that there will be a multiplayer mode.
This will be a bigger, more extravagant adventure than Drake’s Fortune, that’s darker, harder and meaner too. Tweaks to the gameplay, technology and plotting should reap real rewards.
