Uncharted 2: Among Thieves interview - part one

Venture into Uncharted territory as Creative Director Amy Hennig, Co-President Evan Wells, and Co-Lead Designers Richard Lemarchand and Neil Druckmann reveal more about Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

Can you explain the basics of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves in terms of story and gameplay?

Amy Hennig: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves picks up a couple of years after the story in Uncharted ends. As in the last game, Drake's new adventure revolves around an unsolved historical mystery – this time surrounding Marco Polo and his doomed voyage home from China in 1292. After spending almost 20 years in the court of the emperor Kublai Khan, Marco Polo departed with 14 ships and over 600 passengers and crew – but when he arrived at his destination a year and a half later, only one ship remained, and only 18 of the passengers had survived. Although Marco Polo described almost every other aspect of his journeys in minute detail, he never revealed what happened to the ships that were lost.

So Drake, attracted by the potential treasure to be found and inspired by the intrigue around this historical mystery, embarks on a quest to find Marco Polo's lost fleet. But he soon discovers that Marco Polo was hiding a much greater secret – he had gone on a secret expedition on behalf of the emperor to find the mythical kingdom of Shambhala, otherwise known as Shangri-La, and to recover the legendary Cintamani Stone, the wish-fulfilling jewel of Buddhist mythology. The stone is described by Marco Polo as a massive raw sapphire which, if it truly exists, would be worth billions of dollars today. These discoveries set Drake on a new course, following Marco Polo's 700-year-old trail through a diverse range of exotic environments to find out if the lost city of Shambhala, rumoured to lie deep in the Himalayas, really exists.

How are you using the power of PlayStation 3 for Among Thieves?

Richard Lemarchand: Naughty Dog has a 15-year tradition of pushing the PlayStation hardware to its limits, and Uncharted 2 sees us setting new gold standards in limit-pushing! After we shipped Uncharted: Drake's Fortune we gave our programmers some time to freely explore any aspect of our engine or the hardware that they were interested in. Everybody immediately got down to business, tweaking the code and adding new features to our engine. As a result, we've been able to squeeze out a lot more of the power out of the PlayStation 3.

With Uncharted 2, the Naughty Dog Engine 2.0 simply allows us to do more, do it better and do it faster. For example, we can display more polygons on screen than we could in Uncharted, allowing us to create environments with even more detail than the last game, and we've increased the number of enemies that Drake can fight at once. Our lighting and shadowing systems have been overhauled. We've revamped the way we render our skies to include much more realistic light effects and a procedural layer of cloud cover.

Also, we're really going for it with the rendering of the snow in Uncharted 2, just like we did with water in the first game – if Naughty Dog is going to do snow, it's got to be the best snow that you've ever seen in a videogame!

As if that wasn't enough, we're taking on fur and cloth this time. Our animations are more fluid and even more complex. The Artificial Intelligence systems have been vastly expanded. The list goes on and on.

What ideas feature in Among Thieves that you didn't have the time or resources to put in the first game, and which ones are totally new?

Evan Wells: One of our major goals in the Uncharted games is to do everything we can to ground Drake in reality. With this in mind, we examined our climbing mechanics and animation to see how we could improve upon it in Uncharted 2 and make it look and feel more like what one would expect when climbing and exploring. To that end, we've added animations and technology that allow Drake to freely climb and explore the environment in a much more free-form manner. We've also given Drake the ability to fire his weapon from any state whether he is walking, running, climbing, swinging, or balancing. This frees up our level designers to throw in combat set-ups anytime and anywhere, even when Drake is negotiating some tricky traversal sections. All together this helps make the game a more seamless experience because the player won't feel a significant shift in gameplay or pacing that might break the high level of immersion we're known for creating in our games.

Gunplay is obviously a very important aspect of our game as well, and one that we wanted to give even more attention to this time around. We want to leverage the strengths of our traversal mechanics, in particular, our climbing mechanics, and how they interact with our cover based third person shooting mechanics, by adding a vertical dimension to the combat spaces. Another important improvement is the new layer to our combat we've added by introducing an action-stealth element to our game. Players can choose to sneak up on their enemies and attempt to take them out one at a time without alerting the others in the area, or they can take a more aggressive route and run in with guns blazing. It's a fast-paced, action-oriented style of stealth gameplay – not extremely tactical and slow – which really allows the player the freedom to assess an environment, size up their opponents, and play in the style that they want.

What are the main differences in terms of gameplay between Drake's Fortune and Among Thieves?

Neil Druckmann: One of the main differences is the addition of our action-stealth mechanic, which is all about adding complexity, expanding player choice in our combat situations, and fleshing out our enemy AI system. Action represents the idea that we're trying to keep the pace up and stealth represents the tactics we're familiar with regarding taking out enemies unnoticed. We don't want to introduce the frustration of being forced to move at the game's pace by replaying and replaying a set-up due to failing a stealth heavy situation.

Providing the option of action-stealth allows the player the choice to get more invested in the set-ups, getting to know more about the environments than a straight gunfight would allow. It also allows us to embed more narrative and story into the gameplay. By showing what enemies are doing before you're engaged in combat and by overhearing some background conversations, you'll be able to see more of the story in context to the environment or situation. It also reinforces the story needs by allowing us to make set-ups more appropriate to the tone of the story. Is Drake infiltrating an area? Are the enemies already in defensive positions? Whatever the story needs, we can have the enemies parallel that feeling now.

As a result of expanding our gameplay to account for action-stealth, we've changed the dynamics of how a player approaches a combat situation by adding new behaviours to enemies: an investigate behaviour and a hunting behaviour. With the investigate behaviour, the enemies have peripheral vision just like humans. When Drake enters this peripheral vision, the enemies will look over in the direction they think they saw him, and depending on how long he was in this vision cone, they may just dismiss what they saw or they may walk over and check out the area Drake stood in. The hunt behaviour is triggered when the enemies have already spotted Drake and are engaged in combat with him. While in combat the enemies make certain assumptions on where Drake is, based on his last known location. If they lose sight of Drake for a few seconds, they will start hunting around the area, starting with his last known location, and then spread their search out if he's not found. Our battles can be switched up from straightforward gun fights to an action-stealth battle midway through, picking off each enemy one by one as they separate in their hunt for Drake.

This just further reinforces our focus on creating player choice in Uncharted 2 and choice is the other key word here. We've implemented the new action-stealth mechanics with the knowledge that not everyone likes stealth gameplay. We think it's fun and it adds a lot to our ability to reinforce the story, but you should play the way you want, even if that means just going in guns blazing. We're just giving the player more options to play the set-ups however they like.