I’ve finished Uncharted 2 and loved it (bias note, I’m friends with one of the game designers, but mine is hardly a unique opinion). Since the game has been out for a while and has been well reviewed I’m going to skip the consumer advising part of this post and instead give a link-fest: great, if familiar, characterization and writing; an example of the potential of authored, as opposed to self-authored, narrative in game; and polish that gets so many little things right. Instead I want to focus on the “Active Cinematic Experience,” to use Naughty Dog’s term. Brainy Gamer Michael Abbott mentioned an interest in doing a post on that topic, but if he did I’m not finding it (it may have come up in the podcasts; I listened to some of the Uncharted 2-relevant ones before playing the game). I don’t have his theater training, but I hope to have an interesting thing or two to say. I don’t know to what extent this was true of Uncharted 1; I just got my PS3 (Thanks Kate’s parents!) so I haven’t yet played the original and thus can’t compare them.
I think the main innovation of Uncharted 2 is keeping the player in control over the vast majority of set pieces without resorting much to quick time events. In the past days of gaming, many of the awesome things your character did occurred in cut-scenes or didn’t use the main mechanics of the game. One of the most common solutions was quick time events, basically making cut scenes more interactive by requiring the player to place a certain button when it flashed up on the scene. In the past year I’ve played Shenmue 2, a series known for originating the term, and in a given cut scene you may have to duck and weave around a crowded market, disarm someone as they draw a knife on you, or make a difficult jump to a distant rooftop. I enjoyed what I played of Shenmue 2, but I got stuck in part because of the reliance on quick time events. I’m bad at brawlers and the game gave me relatively little practice with the core fighting system. In some ways, quick time events were an advance over just watching a video, but as game play goes they’re pretty thin gruel.
Uncharted 2 doesn’t completely avoid quick time events. They show in a few of the boss and special enemy fights when you go to fisticuffs, but they rely on them far less than say, God of War, in combat. More important, the game has a variety of crazy sequences: fights on trains, gun fights on a truck convoy, escaping a collapsing building, etc. that allow for full control while doing things that would be cut scenes in other games. I think the hand-to-hand combat is also an example of this phenomenon.
Against unaware enemies you can pull off visually entertaining stealth attacks with a single square button press. In other cases you mash the square button to attack an enemy but need the triangle button to break out of grabs. The game helps you some, more with weaker enemies, by slowing down when you need to break out of a pin but this doesn’t break the organic feel in the same way that quick time events do.
So how did they pull this off?
I haven’t read too much about the making of the game, although I did watch the one bonus tech and game play video (which did include a quick shot of my friend). So, the following are mostly guesses, but I think they’re educated ones:
Level design: Uncharted 2 is a highly linear game. The player’s reward for such linearity is good writing, 12-15 hours of play without a lot of fat, and a great deal of designer attention to each level. Scripted events abound with ledges regularly collapsing under Drake and the like without punishing the player (I’ve seen some complaints in comments about excessive collapses; there’s a point there, but I think different, not less, scripting is the likely solution).
Good use of predictable and context-sensitive controls: Here I’m primarily thinking the jump controls and to a lesser extent the melee combat. Mitch Krpata describes the jump mechanics:
Nathan does a lot of climbing, swinging, and shimmying, [as a side note, I thought the swinging was the weakest mechanical element] which always has the potential to be a bear. Some games have done this stuff better than others.Although a lot of people liked the magnetic approach of inFamous, I thought it was intrusive. Uncharted 2 has a little bit of auto-assist too, but it's much more subtle. Nathan will turn and grab a ledge if you walk off it, but not if you run or jump off. Instead of being sucked toward grabbable objects in mid-air, most of Nathan's jumps are directed in such a way that you can't help but move in the right direction to begin with. This is the advantage of the linear, scripted approach over a more open world. [Emphasis mine]
The ubiquity of the locomotion elements of the game play make the context sensitivity feel natural. I like being able to grapple over cover in Gears of War and Resident Evil 4&5, but that feature came up intermittently. In my view, the weakest component of this was the swinging. Maneuvering on something you could also swing from was hard, but otherwise the controls were the opposite of finicky.
The Jump button is fairly smart which helps keeps pointless jumping puzzle deaths to a minimum. Opportunities to jump are also fairly ubiquitous so the smart controls feel less restricting than in say, Gears of War and the later Resident Evil games, where you can leap over cover but it’s obviously tied to certain terrain elements which makes it feel less like a game play element. Triangle key for pin break does a pretty good job of giving visual clues, though apparently not such a good job that it was trusted for all boss fights, so there’s still some work to do there. I’m sure some hard core jumping puzzle types don’t like the lack of control, but the context sensitivity allows for much faster game play which introduces challenges in a different form. At the same time, the controls aren’t confused by introducing a bunch of mini-games or alternate uses: e.g. there’s a lot of vehicles but driving is never a significant part of game play.
Intuitiveness of new situations: Drake’s habit of talking to himself and his chatty allies also go a long way to helping the player figure out what to do even in a frantic situation. A great checkpoint system that starts you pointed in the right direction helps a lot if you don’t figure out something the first time. If anything the checkpoint system seemed slightly too forgiving. I’d sometimes manage to die immediately on entering a new area and then re-spawn as if I’d gracefully crossed the finish line. I suspect that ample play testing was also part of this process. I could tell a couple of sequences were pretty heavily railroaded (see: one shooting puzzle in a jumping level midgame) probably because players just weren’t getting it.
Outright trickery: I’m sure that some of this level design is out and out trickery; I’ve heard that accounts for much of what people loved about Half Life 1’s AI. That’s okay; it doesn’t make the sequences less fun, but it does mean that you can’t just license the code work for Uncharted 2 and expected it to work without a lot of good level design and scripted events. This gets to one of the advantages of the highly disciplined game design: it means that the various tricks don’t wear out their welcome.
So will we see these widely applied? Sadly, no; I don’t expect we’re going to see a mass proliferation of a lot of these innovations as the controls are the main procedural part of this equation. Good design tools will go a long way, but I have no idea if the ones used to do Uncharted 2 will be available for license and even then I suspect that we’ll just see big-budget titles using them.
However, I do think Mitch Krpata gets it right in emphasizing the ruthless discipline of Uncharted 2. For games without an open world and that don’t feel forced to inflate game play hours, Uncharted 2 shows the benefit of focusing on design work. Games that can pass for movies are just going to be heinously expensive to produce, but I think this approach probably works in other genres and Uncharted 2 will provide a literal textbook example of how to do with mechanics what was once done with cut scenes.
Also, as a grateful side note, there’s a chapter select option for any of the 26 chapters, one that lets you select difficulty and that lists the number of secrets still unfound. I’m sure this has been done before, but it’s a lovely feature and one that should be widely used in quality over quantity titles in the future.
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