John Bender
Banned
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End - The story behind the biggest game of the year
Everything was Uncharted. You’ll have seen the jokes, no doubt – the ones that pointed out how many games at E3 2012 seemed to be based on an external interpretation of the Naughty Dog design document. That show brought a host of linear games built on tightly scripted spectacle, sacrificing player agency for the whims of a stubborn author. The complaint was aimed at other developers, at an industry in thrall to the cookie cutter, but it stung Naughty Dog by extension as well. Many of those games have since turned out to be nothing like Uncharted. At December’s PlayStation Experience (PSX) event, filmed live in Vegas and streamed around the world, Naughty Dog suggested Uncharted 4 wasn’t, in the E3 2012 pejorative sense of the term, very Uncharted either. Over the course of a day inside the Santa Monica studio, we are shown the proof of it. Within half an hour, game director Bruce Straley has summed it up perfectly. “There’s no one golden path,” he tells us. “It’s not just as simple as pushing forward on the stick all the time.”
It’s a telling line. Straley is explaining Uncharted 4’s expanded traversal and climbing system, but it’s a valid summation of what we’ve seen of the game as a whole. More to the point, it shows the studio is keenly aware of the criticism – often overstated, but not entirely unfounded – of the way it has historically made its games. ‘Just pushing forward on the stick’? It’s what other people say about the Uncharteds, and the games that have followed in their wake. “I don’t really consider what other people are saying,” Straley says. “But when you do read it, in falls into alignment with what you’re already thinking as a player and developer. It reinforces what you’re already considering doing.”
Creative director Neil Druckmann backs Straley up: “We’re evolving as developers. We have different sensibilities in what we’re attracted to in games, and what we want to play. If we were making Uncharted 2 today, it would probably be a very different game.”
Druckmann was a mere lead designer on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the creative director’s chair instead filled by Amy Hennig, who left in still-unspecified, but seemingly acrimonious circumstances early last year. Any hope of getting clarification on that is shut down almost as soon as we walk into the studio, the prospect not so much taken off the table as set on fire and thrown out the window, and the table with it. But her departure, and that of series’ design lead Richard Lemarchand, has presented Straley and Druckmann with a fresh start. As has the move to a new generation of consoles, PS4’s power allowing perhaps the most technically capable studio on the planet today to stretch itself even further. Straley and Druckmann have matured as developers, and taken Naughty Dog as a whole along with them. The studio’s method of making games has evolved, and Drake has had to change in kind.
As Straley suggests early on in our visit, the climbing system was the logical starting point. Ever since Nathan Drake first reached for a glimmering handhold in 2007’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, this series’ climbing systems have been exercises in linearity, in following a single, obvious path to the next combat scene or set-piece. The PSX demo, and the extended version we’re shown at the studio, do a poor job of conveying just how much that has changed. At a glance, Drake’s clambering seems to be the same as ever, a semi-automated journey between conveniently placed and similarly coloured ledges and handholds. There are new tools, but the 2014 Nathan Drake’s piton mimics the 2013 Lara Croft’s climbing axe right down to the look of the surfaces on which it can be used, while the grapple rope can only be attached to preordained points marked with a button prompt. When Drake misjudges a jump and nearly falls, saved only by the tips of his fingers, it is hard to resist a roll of the eyes.
At the studio, Straley plays through the sequence again, stopping periodically to explain exactly what we’re looking at. He takes a totally different route. Uncharted’s climbing has been drastically overhauled, its PS3-era animation system scrapped and rebuilt to allow full analogue movement through 360 degrees using real body physics. ‘Slip events’, as Straley calls them, are not mapped to individual parts of scenery but triggered by the angle and distance of Drake’s jump, as well as the type of handhold. Smaller, less stable ones will break more easily; if they do, you’ll need to take another route. Where Croft’s axe was little more than a different animation for the trip along the critical path, here the piton is designed to empower freedom. Those grapple points may be fixed, but they’re multipurpose – you can swing, as Straley did at PSX, but also abseil, climb, or run along and around cliff faces. Uncharted’s most linear system has become remarkably freeform. Instead of pushing up on the stick, you’re solving a puzzle. It’s not about finding the start of the path and sticking to it, but forging your own.
The same applies to combat. Here, too, are moments that whiff of the cinematics designer’s hand – though it’s hard to complain when you’ve just swung across a gap on a rope, let go, smacked a goon in the face on your way down, grabbed his rifle out of the air and started shooting at the next poor fool in your way – but the improvements are immediately apparent. There’s the enemy AI, which has been afforded a similar traversal moveset to Drake’s, enabling opponents to jump gaps and clamber up ledges in pursuit of their quarry, a true generational leap from the days when foes would spawn behind cover and stay there. Break line of sight – by crouching into the dense, reactive foliage, perhaps, or dropping yourself off a ledge – and enemies won’t return to their preset patrol routes, but stay in place or seek you out, communicating all the while. Uncharted 4’s combat isn’t just about shooting, but a blend of stealth, traversal, melee and gunplay set in a vast, vertical space full of opportunities. Suddenly, a series once famed for its linearity feels uncommonly like a sandbox.
Yet this has not been a sudden change. It is the evolution of a process that began in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, when Drake gained the ability to fire a gun from any traversal state. Straley says it’s about “building up mechanics that you can use again and again, that scale properly. For me, it’s all about systems, about boiling down the essence of the systems so you can properly layer them. It empowers the player to toy around.” He recalls a level from a former Naughty Dog game, 2003’s Jak II, in which the protagonist rode a rocket. Straley died a dozen times working out the mechanics, and many more times working his way through the level. “Then I never saw that rocket again for the rest of a 40-hour experience. I didn’t like the design process in Jak II; it didn’t feel like there were really systems. It was the first time I got angry about our own development internally.” It is sometimes easy to forget that Naughty Dog existed before Uncharted. It has been in business for 30 years, 25 under its current name, and has been learning all the while.
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Much much more here
edit.:
You guys are throwing too much of a fit over a headline. Quit it.
