Just after showing the full E3 demo of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Co-Lead Game Designers Kurt Margenau and Anthony Newman answered a few questions from the fans.
Here’s a summary of the information they gave:
- E3 has ended, but the team is still working on improving the gameplay included in the demo. For instace, a developer has noticed that the speedometer of the Jeep was at zero during the demo.
- The demo isn’t an early level, but it’s a little later, after the player has already gotten used to the mechanics.
- It’s not accurate that the game is getting darker because the team behind The Last of Us is working on it. The series is just maturing, but the theme is still adventurous and bombastic.
- The jeep is something Naughty Dog wanted to do in the Uncharted series for a while, and it overlaps a lot with other mechanics in the game, like the rope.
- The team looked at the game and picked up the appropriate slice of gameplay for E3, according to the fact that it can show the best features of the game in little time, with the right pacing and without needing too much setup.
- The demo is one of the craziest parts of the game, and it’s the current benchmark for the number of opbjects on the screen and destructibility.
- Naughty Dog hasn’t decided how long the game will be, bit feels the biggest Uncharted they ever made.
- The multiplayer beta will be exclusive to those who will buy the Nathan Drake Collection.
- Sam Drake is “much more Drake’s equal” than any other character in the game, as he’s similar to him and has the same skills and knowledge. The chemistry between voice actors is great.
- Single Player will run at 30 frames per second. It was the best solution for the gameplay and quality, and Naughty Dog wanted to have the best looking game possible, with the best graphics and phisics possible. Framerate has to be considered against everything else in the game, and the developers feel that locked, stable 30 FPS is better than variable 60. On top of that, higher frame rate would require even more optimization for every level, inflating the time it takes for each to get made and requiring the team to make more compromises.
- Multiplayer still targets 60 frames per second, and the team can’t wait to show it off.
- The team learned from The Last of Us to create more open levels, and core mechanics influencing the interaction between characters, to make them come out as more alive.
- Having an Arabic language localization is a priority for the team, but it’s not known if it’ll actually be in, for now.
- The rope has been implemented because it’s a perfectly natural evolution, and an extension of the fluidity of Uncharted‘s gameplay. Very little of it was shown so far, but it’s a big part of the game and it’s gonna be used a lot. It’s the most realistic rope Newman has ever seen. It can pin on a ledge and create a swing point. The spin point can also physically slide.
- Nathan Drake is physically enabled almost all the time, and a lot of ragdoll physics have been added to him. There’s a lot of “crazy new tech” going on with him. The team wanted to make him as responsive as possible to the stick, but still look like a person reacting realistically (but in a slightly over-the-top cinematic way) to situations.
- There are different animations for slightly lover cover positions, to which Drake can automatically switch as the cover becomes lower (for instance the deflating bags).
- There’s going to be a photo mode in the game, and the team is going to improve it from the one we saw in The Last of Us.
It's an Uncharted game, what the hell else is it supposed to look like?
