Last week I sat down with Amy Hennig, Creative Director at Naughty Dog, to pick her brain about all things Uncharted 2. We covered a number of topics including where the characters are now, her opinion on Drake's voice actor appearing in Prince of Persia, and what changes we'll see to the game as it makes it's second appearance on the PS3. Read on for the complete interview.
UGO: From what we've seen so far, it looks like the scope for Uncharted 2 is much larger than the original's. The screenshots we've seen indicate that Drake will be headed all over Southeast Asia... how many locations are there this time around?
Ammy Hennig: Well you start off with certain expectations regarding scope and then sometimes you pare them back as you go or sometimes you add to them. You know, it's funny, but I actually haven't counted them.
There's a variety of locations, all the way from Southeastern Europe to Southeast Asia and up through Nepal and the Himalayas. So we get everything from urban environments to a jungle swamp on a Southeast Asian island to Himalayan Monastaries. There's a lot more variety than we were able to do in our last game, given our location, because it was so localized on that one island.
So how exactly has Drake changed this time around? Not necessarily just emotionally, but physically? He's obviously scruffed up a bit and it looks like he's even gained some more muscle.
Well he was a little skinnier in the last game than we actually intended him to be in some ways. But sometimes when you've made a decision you just have to go with it because there's no time to keep revising. And so we wanted this one to just give him a little bit more bulk, but we don't want to take it too far because he's supposed to be a regular guy. But when you watch him climb around like a monkey--as he does often--you know he's got to have some muscles on him right?
And he keeps the magic shirt?
[laughter] Oh yes, the semi-tucked magic shirt has made it in.
So what about the emotional bits?
It's been a couple of years and obviously characters have moved on from the snapshot where we left them at the end of the last game. Their relationships have changed and that's something we'll explore. But we explore it in a way that would not be off-putting to somebody that's new to the franchise with Uncharted 2. It's not a requirement to play the first game at all. But on the other hand, we want to honor the continuity of the story, and the characters, and the questions that players of Uncharted 1 will have had going into this game.
Like I said, he's in a place where we'll actually be able to see more of him "in his element" than we got to see him in the last game. And I don't want people to misinterpret that as him being in a darker place, because I personally hate that when games just go darker...
There's a lot of examples of it and it just seems like the obvious route. The last thing that I want people to walk away with from these previews is that we've made him emo or angsty or anything like that, because it's still got the humor and charm that the first game had. But at the same time, we also wanted to tackle some more complex themes and some more challenging ideas with the interactions between the characters. By exploring who he is in his normal life, his "real" world--which is a world full of smugglers and thieves and seedy underworld characters that he swims along with--we get to explore those aspects of his character that didn't necessarily get to come out in the first game. We only hinted that in the very beginning of Uncharted 1 when he was planning on screwing Elena over. Obviously, he and Sully have some pretty unsavory colleagues that they work with occasionally, and we just wanted to see more of that world.
Obviously Nolan North (the actor that plays Nathan Drake) has a very distinct voice. How did you feel about it when you found out that he was in the new Prince of Persia?
Well... We think Nolan is amazing. All I can say, as his friend, is that I'm so gratified to see that other people get to work with him and see how amazing he is as he's taking on more lead roles in projects.
What about as a creative?
[laughter] Well there are a lot of similarities between the two games, but I think people can distinguish them from one another. It's not like any decision made by the Prince of Persia team will have any effect on us, or vice versa. In a way it was kind of gratifying for us because people said, "Hey, Nathan Drake's in Prince of Persia." At least it was that way around and not "the Prince is in Uncharted," right?
[laughter]
As long as it's that way I'll stay happy.
You guys have been pretty happy to point out that Uncharted 1 only used 30% of the PS3's power while Uncharted 2 now uses the whole 100. Were there any new narrative corridors that opened up for you now that you've got a better handle of the system?
Well it opens up a lot more just in terms of the authenticity of the environments. There's nothing specific about narrative that it opened up. But what it does open up is a seamless-ness to the experience that doesn't pull you out of there. We can draw more to the screen, the effects can be that much more impressive and numerous, all the layered character animations become all the more believable...
The last thing you want when you're trying to tell a story that sucks players in and immerses them, is to have them pulled out by a technical necessity like loading.
We never load any data--it just streams constantly off the disc. You can sit down and play the game in one sitting. And surprisingly, a lot of people did. It's incredibly self-affirming and gratifying to know that people loved it that much.
The section of the game we saw today had Drake running through a city while two opposing factions were in the midst of fighting a war on those same streets. The scene actually reminded me a lot of MGS4 for that reason. Are we going to be seeing a lot of this "man against two armies" kind of play in Uncharted 2?
Well we want to change it up. There will be times in the game when you're the lone man battling against two other factions. There will be times when you're the lone man and the whole faction is searching for you. And there will be times where you'll be joined up with other people and you'll be fighting there alongside them. The fact that we change it up over the course of the game keeps it from getting stale. On the other hand, it's a piece of Drake's personality that he's the "Die Hard" guy that gets in there and just takes care of the situation; "the fly in the ointment," to borrow a phrase.
Now I have to ask, is there a chance for multiplayer? With all the climbing and the new traversal gunplay mechanic, it looks like it could be a lot of fun.
We always want to have an experience that will be as extensible for people as possible. It's already great because there are people that say they've played Uncharted over and over again. And they've gone back to get the trophies and all that. Anything that we can do online to extend that experience is great, but multiplayer isn't something that we're discussing.
Any special bonuses for players that have made it through the first game?
Just a few things. Nothing we're ready to talk about right now just because we want to keep it flexible--and right now wouldn't be the right time to announce anything anyway. But again, it would all be ancillary to the primary experience.
So where is Elena? Is she still going to be involved in the plot in some way?
She is the mystery maiden right now and we are being deliberately mysterious. Everybody likes to leap to conclusions when we say that all we want to talk about is Chloe right now. But like I said earlier, the whole point is to have a larger, more varied, cast that's more diverse and reflects different aspects of Drake's character. You can draw from that what you will.
Oh I will... Last time we spoke we talked about Quick Time Events and the role they play to strike a balance between cut scenes and gameplay. You mentioned that you found them tricky for those very reasons and that's why they only showed up occasionally in Uncharted 1. Has your opinion evolved now as you're working on Uncharted 2? Will we see QTE's again in this outing?
I'm generally not a fan of QTE's, in the typical sense -- meaning, I don't like arbitrary button-press events with punishing timing and a tiny window of success, where the player is almost guaranteed to fail at least once. For me, these kind of events pull me out of the experience.
On the other hand, sometimes context-sensitive events cued with button-prompts can be a great bridge between gameplay and cutscenes -- we always prefer to keep the player in control, especially during dramatic events. So as long as the action is intuitive, and we give the player a fair window of opportunity to respond, I think cued events like this can actually be pretty engaging. They just have to be implemented well.
Ok, one more question... Zombie monsters?
There are no zombie monsters in the first game. [laughter] I'm taking you to task on "zombie-monsters."
Well they were probably one of the biggest criticisms of Uncharted 1...
There was a 50/50 response on that. Some people loved the twist there towards the end, some people hated it.
If "zombie monsters"--you've got me using quotes now--were a glass, would you say it was half full or half empty?
Hmm... As an optimist I guess I see it as half full, right? I think there were ways that we could have done that better in the first game, for sure. I think our genre is about surprises and unexpected twists. Any good narrative that compels you to keep watching is about the unexpected--which is particularly true about our genre. Now, you don't want to pull the rug out from people. We thought we'd laid plenty of breadcrumbs about what we were doing, but people were still taken aback by that twist in Uncharted. So, if that were a mistake I wouldn't want to make that mistake again. I guess, sometimes in games where the narrative goes on and on, you have to be a little more heavy handed about foreshadow.
But, I would say that one of our rules is that there's no magic in our world; there's nothing technically supernatural. Mysterious things happen, but there's really always an underlying scientific explanation for it. But that doesn't make it any less mysterious.
Thanks again, Amy.
Of course! Thank you.
