I've heard that the game was not always a cover shooter.
For most of its development cycle, the first Uncharted was a brawler slash lock-on shooter. There was no aiming. You had a gun, and you could lock on to enemies and shoot at them. But we thought we could create a game that had that kind of pulp-action feel, where you would just run around without having to worry about moving a second analog stick and aiming.
We tried all these minigames – if I have a lock-on, how do I make aiming challenging? Is it timing based? None of those ideas were fun. And we tried them for many, many, many months.
The first iteration was, OK, only when you take cover, we can let you aim. As soon as we put that in, all of a sudden combat became even more engaging. There was an interesting challenge that wasn't there before.
We built a lot of the game, and a lot of story, and then we were like, "Oh my God, we built a really short game. Let's throw a bunch of combat into every environment." To me, playing it back, I still think it's an awesome achievement, but it's a little overstuffed with combat in waves. I think it kind of ruins what has a really beautiful story underneath it. Maybe "ruins" is a bit harsh. But hampers, a little bit.
