Everything was Uncharted. You’ll have seen the jokes, no
doubt – the ones that pointed out how many games at E3
2012 seemed to be based on an external interpretation of the
Naughty Dog design document. That show brought a host of
linear games built on tightly scripted spectacle, sacrificing
player agency for the whims of a stubborn author. The
complaint was aimed at other developers, at an industry in
thrall to the cookie cutter, but it stung Naughty Dog by
extension as well. Many of those games have since turned
out to be nothing like Uncharted. At December’s PlayStation
Experience (PSX) event, filmed live in Vegas and streamed
around the world, Naughty Dog suggested Uncharted 4
wasn’t, in the E3 2012 pejorative sense of the term, very
Uncharted either. Over the course of a day inside the Santa
Monica studio, we are shown the proof of it. Within half
an hour, game director Bruce Straley has summed it up
perfectly. “There’s no one golden path,” he tells us. “It’s not
just as simple as pushing forward on the stick all the time.”
It’s a telling line. Straley is explaining Uncharted 4’s
expanded traversal and climbing system, but it’s a valid
summation of what we’ve seen of the game as a whole.
More to the point, it shows the studio is keenly aware of
the criticism – often overstated, but not entirely unfounded
– of the way it has historically made its games. ‘Just pushing
forward on the stick’? It’s what other people say about the
Uncharteds, and the games that have followed in their wake.
“I don’t really consider what other people are saying,” Straley
says. “But when you do read it, in falls into alignment with
what you’re already thinking as a player and developer. It
reinforces what you’re already considering doing.”
Creative director Neil Druckmann backs Straley up:
“We’re evolving as developers. We have different sensibilities
in what we’re attracted to in games, and what we want to
play. If we were making Uncharted 2 today, it would probably
be a very different game.”
Druckmann was a mere lead designer on Uncharted 2:
Among Thieves, the creative director’s chair instead filled by
Amy Hennig, who left in still-unspecified, but seemingly
acrimonious circumstances early last year. Any hope of
getting clarification on that is shut down almost as soon
as we walk into the studio, the prospect not so much taken
off the table as set on fire and thrown out the window, and
the table with it. But her departure, and that of series’
design lead Richard Lemarchand, has presented Straley and
Druckmann with a fresh start. As has the move to a new
generation of consoles, PS4’s power allowing perhaps the
most technically capable studio on the planet today to
stretch itself even further. Straley and Druckmann have
matured as developers, and taken Naughty Dog as a whole
along with them. The studio’s method of making games
has evolved, and Drake has had to change in kind.
compass
As Straley suggests early on in our visit, the climbing
system was the logical starting point. Ever since Nathan
Drake first reached for a glimmering handhold in 2007’s
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, this series’ climbing systems have
been exercises in linearity, in following a single, obvious path
to the next combat scene or set-piece. The PSX demo, and
the extended version we’re shown at the studio, do a poor job
of conveying just how much that has changed. At a glance,
Drake’s clambering seems to be the same as ever, a semiautomated
journey between conveniently placed and
similarly coloured ledges and handholds. There are new tools,
but the 2014 Nathan Drake’s piton mimics the 2013 Lara
Croft’s climbing axe right down to the look of the surfaces
on which it can be used, while the grapple rope can only be
attached to preordained points marked with a button prompt.
When Drake misjudges a jump and nearly falls, saved only by
the tips of his fingers, it is hard to resist a roll of the eyes.
At the studio, Straley plays through the sequence again,
stopping periodically to explain exactly what we’re looking
at. He takes a totally different route. Uncharted’s climbing
has been drastically overhauled, its PS3-era animation system
scrapped and rebuilt to allow full analogue movement
through 360 degrees using real body physics. ‘Slip events’,
as Straley calls them, are not mapped to individual parts of
scenery but triggered by the angle and distance of Drake’s
jump, as well as the type of handhold. Smaller, less stable
ones will break more easily; if they do, you’ll need to take
another route. Where Croft’s axe was little more than a
different animation for the trip along the critical path, here
the piton is designed to empower freedom. Those grapple
points may be fixed, but they’re multipurpose – you can
swing, as Straley did at PSX, but also abseil, climb, or run
along and around cliff faces. Uncharted’s most linear system
has become remarkably freeform. Instead of pushing up on
the stick, you’re solving a puzzle. It’s not about finding the
start of the path and sticking to it, but forging your own.
The same applies to combat. Here, too, are moments
that whiff of the cinematics designer’s hand – though it’s
hard to complain when you’ve just swung across a gap on a
rope, let go, smacked a goon in the face on your way down,
grabbed his rifle out of the air and started shooting at the
next poor fool in your way – but the improvements are
immediately apparent. There’s the enemy AI, which has
been afforded a similar traversal moveset to Drake’s,
enabling opponents to jump gaps and clamber up ledges
in pursuit of their quarry, a true generational leap from the
days when foes would spawn behind cover and stay there.
Break line of sight – by crouching into the dense, reactive
foliage, perhaps, or dropping yourself off a ledge – and
enemies won’t return to their preset patrol routes, but stay
in place or seek you out, communicating all the while.
Uncharted 4’s combat isn’t just about shooting, but a blend
of stealth, traversal, melee and gunplay set in a vast, vertical
space full of opportunities. Suddenly, a series once famed
for its linearity feels uncommonly like a sandbox.
Yet this has not been a sudden change. It is the evolution
of a process that began in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, when
Drake gained the ability to fire a gun from any traversal
state. Straley says it’s about “building up mechanics that you
can use again and again, that scale properly. For me, it’s all
about systems, about boiling down the essence of the
systems so you can properly layer them. It empowers the
player to toy around.” He recalls a level from a former
Naughty Dog game, 2003’s Jak II, in which the protagonist
rode a rocket. Straley died a dozen times working out the
mechanics, and many more times working his way through
the level. “Then I never saw that rocket again for the rest of a
40-hour experience. I didn’t like the design process in Jak II;
it didn’t feel like there were really systems. It was the first
time I got angry about our own development internally.” It is
sometimes easy to forget that Naughty Dog existed before
Uncharted. It has been in business for 30 years, 25 under its
current name, and has been learning all the while.
Yet Jak II isn’t quite the game that springs most readily to
mind as we watch the new demo. Instead, thoughts turn to
Naughty Dog’s most widely acclaimed title, the one that saw
Druckmann and Straley become the studio’s creators in
chief. There is a tremendous amount of The Last Of Us here,
especially in the fluid, alternating switches between combat
and stealth against enemies that communicate and move
around freely. Drake closes out the demo by rope-swinging
away from the final group of grunts, a callback to the
lightbulb moment in TLOU when you first realised evasion
was as valid a strategy as clearing out the entire room.
“That’s been part of our evolution,” Straley says. “It’s us
getting more comfortable with systemic approaches, with
wider layouts, with how you integrate story with gameplay,
with layout, with music. It’s been a constant evolution.”
ship icon
The most transformative evolution of them all
comes courtesy not of those within Naughty Dog’s walls,
however, but those of its parent company. No other studio
pushed PS3 quite as hard as this one, and you need only look
at the demo’s vast expanse to see how Naughty Dog is
enjoying the lofty headroom afforded by PS4’s processors.
“The way we had to work with memory management inside
of The Last Of Us just to get the width that we had there
was crazy. It was insane,” Straley says. “The Duck tape and
Scotch tape that we used to cobble those levels together just
to get it to run properly… Now we can say, ‘Aah, we have
some memory. Let’s play with this a little bit’. You can
breathe, and let the player breathe a little bit as well.”
The result is the prettiest game the new generation
has yet produced. Texture resolution has been at least
quadrupled across the board from Uncharted 3, but that’s
just the start. Drake comes to on the shore of an island
off the coast of Madagascar, waking up to a backdrop of
procedurally tessellated water. A new dynamic wind system
makes trees, bushes and Drake’s hair – both on his head
and his chest – sway in tandem. Up close, a system that
was co-developed by Naughty Dog and Sony’s Advanced
Technology Group delivers a more efficient way of making
highly detailed surfaces without using performance-hungry
adaptive tessellation; farther away, the studio is relying far
more on background LOD algorithms than it ever has before.
A new physically based shader more than two years in the
making helps materials to look lifelike using their real-world
properties. The improvements to Drake’s climbing skills are
best shown on a wireframe climbing wall filled with perhaps
100 handholds. As he clambers, the shape of his body adapts
to the changing shape of the wall; we’re told that there are
unique animations for two-thirds of his transitions. On PS3,
Drake’s entire skeleton was made up of 250 bones. Now,
there are 800 in his face alone.
With all that going on, it’s little surprise that the demo
runs at 30fps, despite Naughty Dog’s earlier claims that it
was shooting for 60. “We’re actually above 30, but we locked
it [for the demo],” Straley says (out on the floor, a debug
station shows the game running at 37fps). “We’re going to
do whatever it takes to make the game we want to make. If
it means we could go for 60 but lose something that would
really impact the player’s experience, then it’s our choice as
developers to say, ‘Well, we’re going to go for the experience
over the 60 frames.’”
Refresh rate aside, it’s a remarkable achievement,
especially for a studio that, thanks to spending the previous
generation working solely on PS3, had no PC version of its
engine and thus had a more painful transition to PS4’s x86
architecture than most. Straley and Druckmann may take top
billing, but you simply can’t create a game of this visual
calibre without a tremendously skilled workforce. Modestly,
Druckmann says it’s all about trust, that the scene he writes
will pass through the hands of actors, cinematographers,
artists, animators and so on, each interpreting it in their own
way, before it makes it into the game. Nolan North, Drake’s
voice actor, offers the outsider’s perspective.
“They’ve got amazing minds here,” he tells us. “Everyone
does everything so well. I remember hearing one time that
the test [applicants take] to work here… People have come
in, ready to go, they take the test and they literally walk out
crying. This is the MIT of the game world. There’s some
amazing developers out there, but there’s something about
this one that has made so many great games, and I think
it’s the people. This couldn’t be done just anywhere. There’s
something about the way they harness what the PlayStation
can do that’s special.”
skull icon
PlayStation 4 can do so much more, of course, but it
also presents Naughty Dog with a problem. (The console’s
runaway success means the studio can reasonably expect
its next game to be bought by players that have never played
an Uncharted game. The goal of many sequels is to draw
the old fans and grab new ones to create a bigger audience
than before, of course, but here the gap is sure to be more
pronounced. And three games of baggage is a heavy load,
even for one of the best writing teams in the business.
“The story has to stand on its own, definitely,” says
Druckmann. “And I think there should be enough hints and
reveals to make you understand who Nathan Drake was in
those previous adventures, even if you haven’t played them.
If you have, then you’ll understand, on a much deeper level,
the nuances both of Drake and his relationships.”
In fact, the ending of Uncharted 3 gives Naughty Dog a
clean break of sorts. The new game kicks off four years later,
with Drake settled down and retired from a life of adventure.
He’s lured back into his old ways by his brother, Sam, another
treasure hunter whom Nathan has believed to be dead since
he last saw him some 15 years ago. All that time ago, the pair
were obsessed with finding treasure plundered by Henry
Every, a pirate who amassed the largest ever haul of booty in
the space of two years in the late 17th century, mostly looted
in his capture of the Persian ship Gunsway, and believed to
be worth half a billion dollars by modern standards. While
Nathan moved on, Sam continued the search, and comes back
into his brother’s life with a dual incentive for getting back
on the road. He’s got a new lead on the location of Libertalia,
Every’s mythical pirate utopia. And he’s in trouble with the
sort of people you really don’t want to be in trouble with.
Sam, played by Troy Baker, is not just a handy device for
getting Nathan out of retirement – he gives Naughty Dog
that clean narrative break. Uncharted 3 wrapped up Nathan’s
troubles in the present. Now, the series can dig into his past.
“Every time we add a character, it has to reflect some
facet of the protagonist in an interesting way that the other
characters don’t,” Druckmann tells us. “Bringing in a brother
really lets us explore [the question of] ‘Who is Nathan
Drake?’ How has he evolved over the series from the person
he was before, and even as a kid? What led to the Nathan
Drake you know?”
Yet Sam’s arrival means, at least on the face of it, that the
new Uncharted will be missing something it has always done
so well. While Straley and Druckmann shift awkwardly in
their seats whenever we try to eke further story details out
of them, and give coded references to Drake being with allies
during some levels, currently our hero has no female foil.
Elena, now Nathan’s wife, is seemingly back home, and none
too pleased with him coming out of retirement at that. Nate
and Chloe went their separate ways in Uncharted 3’s third act.
It’s tempting to draw a line to Hennig’s departure, mirroring
the lack of a female voice in studio and game alike, but Ellie
and Tess in The Last Of Us weren’t her work either.
Currently, the only known female character in the game
is Nadine Ross, the leader of the South African private army
that patrols the Madagascan island in which the demo is set.
She and her crew have been hired by Rafe Adler, another
treasure hunter, who has a history with both Drake and his
brother. They’re the enemy, but Druckmann doesn’t like to
think of them in such terms. “When we’re writing for them,
we’re thinking: ‘What’s their point of view?’ They don’t see
themselves as antagonists. They see themselves as being
righteous. It’s very important that we don’t see them as
bad guys.” He takes a similar view to writing women. “You
just write human beings. Don’t necessarily think of them
as men or women, just write with a clear motivation and
clear objectives. Be honest with those characters; don’t write
them as clichés. That’s when they stop being human.”
There is something subversive to the
casting of Troy Baker as Sam Drake.
Nathan Drake is played by Nolan North,
for so long the hardest-working man in
videogame voice acting, and Naughty
Dog has cast the young pretender to
North’s throne as Nate’s older brother. Yet
put the two in same room and there’s no
trace of animosity. It’s hard to get a word
in edgeways, in fact, and tougher still to
keep the pair from veering off on
tangents. “It just seemed like a perfect
fit,” Druckmann says. “Knowing the
relationship between Nolan and Troy,
and how they’re already like best buddies
and almost like brothers, we knew we
could play off that energy on stage.”
Baker has been lending his voice to
games for a decade, but look back on his
early career and you’ll find such intriguing
roles as Miscellaneous Voices, Additional
Voice Talent and Various Soldiers. It’s only
in recent years that he’s hit the big time,
with starring roles in BioShock Infinite,
Infamous: Second Son and, of course, as
Joel in The Last Of Us. For him, Uncharted
has long been an obsession. “When I
first came to LA, all I wanted to do was
be in Uncharted. I wanted to get shot by
Nathan Drake. There was so much about
Uncharted that made me want to do this
[for a living]. I’d done some other stuff
before, but I was like, ‘If that’s how
they’re doing it, that’s how I want to do
it.’ Which is something I think the industry
as a whole was saying. Everyone was like,
‘We want to do it the Naughty Dog way’.”
Few would manage it. Naughty Dog’s
approach to voiceover work is more
common among people making movies
than developing games, with table
readings and rehearsals at which North
has a habit of making little tweaks to the
script. It’s his right – as Druckmann puts it,
“Nolan owns Nathan Drake.” When Drake
thinks wryly out loud as he clambers up
yet another cliff face or contemplates a
yawning chasm before his mud-stained
shoes, it’s often the improvisational result
of North commenting on a video of the
scene that’s playing during recording.
Crucially, for A Thief’s End, Baker and
North have recorded their scenes together
in the same room at the same time, often
while wearing motion-capture suits.
Yet there is often a very good reason
for the way most companies keep their
actors apart, as North makes clear while
explaining that this isn’t the first time
he and Baker have shared a voice booth,
although previously it was hardly on this
scale. “The closest we’ve come was that
Transformers one [Fall Of Cybertron],
where I did Cliffjumper and he did Jazz.
Those two go on a mission together, and
they put us in the booth at the same time,
so we actually got to riff off each other
rather than do it separately. It should
have taken an hour. It took about three.
for step changes, but one of the more
obvious is the move away from rendered
cutscenes. Running Uncharted 4’s
cinematics in-engine in realtime has
meant character models have to be
of cutscene quality throughout the
game, hence the 800 animation bones
in Drake’s face. As
lead programmer
Christian Gyrling
explains, the new
generation means
navigating the
Uncanny Valley’s
darkest depths.
“You need skin
deformation. If Drake
laughs, you need the
skin on the forehead
to move a little bit,
and if it doesn’t, it
feels like he is not
quite alive. The
bulging of your skin
under your eyes when
you’re blinking, laughing or squinting –
that’s the difference between talking to
someone who has skin, [rather than
being] made of plastic.”
The project has already involved a
tremendous amount of work for Gyrling
and the tech team, but the tools the
studio is making for A Thief’s End will
see them through the entire generation.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the
hard part is over. “We learn new things
about the hardware every week,” he
says. “Knowing what happened on PS3,
that’s going to continue for four or five
years. It just keeps on going.”
It was a painful start, too. Naughty
Dog, a Sony subsidiary, spent the past
generation working exclusively on
PS3, and while it pushed the fussy Cell
processor further than anyone, that
counted for nothing when PS4’s specs
came in. “If you’ve never made a console
game before, or if you have a PC engine,
it’s much easier [to develop for],” says
Gyrling. “It’s a very developer-friendly
console. But we had an
extremely specialised
engine for PS3, and
we didn’t have a PC
version. We had to
implement one very,
very quickly – we have
150 people on the other
side of the building that
need to be productive.
It wasn’t that much fun,
but it had to be done.”
Naughty Dog is
no stranger to crunch.
Staff spoke out about
the brutal hours
required to get
Uncharted 3 finished,
and similar graft was needed to make the
sequel’s PSX demo. One staffer explains
that he shaved his head during the
studio’s most recent spell of downtime;
now it almost touches his collar at the
back. You’d understand if morale were
low. “Everyone was super-excited to be
on PS4,” Gyrling tells us, “but while we
were working on Windows, it didn’t
really feel like a project that would ship.
Morale and excitement definitely took a
swing up when we switched. We have a
game, it’s running on PS4, it’s starting to
look beautiful, and we have a lot of
time to keep pushing in all directions.
It’s awesome to work with these guys.
Every day I come into work, it’s fun.”
Uncharted 4 takes many mechanical leaps forward, and
Naughty Dog has smartly interwoven the game’s systems in
a more fluid, dynamic way. But that alone does not a modern
Naughty Dog game make. What defines this studio’s work is
the way everything – mechanics, environments, characters –
sits in service to a story. The demo begins with Nathan and
Sam, a character sketched into existence to allow Druckmann
and Straley to burrow into Drake’s past, pulled apart by a
shipwreck. Sam signals to his brother from a high point far
into the distance, the studio making a vast level and filling
it with threats to properly convey the extent of their
separation, and the importance of reuniting them. It’s set a
few hours into the game, but the shipwreck has stripped
Nathan of all his gear; he starts out with nothing, pulling
the piton from a corpse early on, and scavenging weapons
from enemies he puts down, another against-allodds
scramble to stay alive in a life that has been
full of them. The whole scene is a metaphor for
the brothers’ 15-year separation, a metaphor in
which lots of people get punched in the face.
And scene is the word. “What we’re trying
to do is look at everything, even the moments
between cutscenes, as a scene,” Straley says.
“There’s always something that’s happening with
the character arc that’s important.” In the demo’s
case, there’s a negative at the start in seeing how
far away Sam is, and a positive at the end when
you reach him; what happens in between is up to
you. “We’re thinking in filmic terms, but what’s
important for us is how much of that we can put
on the [analogue] stick. That’s what we start with
in the story discussions. Then, when we talk to
the designers, it’s like, ‘This is where the
characters are at, this is what we’re trying to do,
and these are the mechanics we’re trying to
exploit at this point. Let’s pull those things together and
make the player feel what the characters are feeling’.”
For many studios, story is a secondary concern. Writers
are brought on board late into development and tasked with
fitting a narrative around a game that it is too far along to
even consider changing. Yet for Naughty Dog, it is the first
order of business. “I’m a big advocate of narrative structure,
and that’s something we haven’t always done at the studio,”
Druckmann says. “It’s very important that we know where
we’re heading; even if it changes, you have to know the
beginning, middle and end. Without that, I wouldn’t know
how to direct a team. We have become more conscious of,
more proficient at, storytelling. Whatever meeting we’re
having – even if it’s background or character artists – we’re
speaking the same language. We’re speaking as storytellers.”
Druckman and his team might be keeping quiet on the
finer details, but while we naturally leave Naughty Dog
hungry for more, we’ve already seen so much. (Steve)The demo
itself was smartly chosen, a fine showcase of the overhauled
mechanics and how they work in concert; out on the studio
floor we’ve seen how it has been made, with much of that
best-in-class tech rebuilt from the ground up by some of the
most talented developers in the world. Above all, we’ve seen
an evolution: a studio moving onto new hardware, rethinking
its approach to making games, learning from its successes
and paying heed to criticism, while putting front and centre
something that too many games leave to the end. “There’s
something about the videogame as an artform that allows
you to connect with a character in a way no other medium
allows,” Druckmann says. “You’re directing someone’s
actions, empathising with them in a way that’s unique to
videogames. We’re just now starting to really understand
how to capitalise on that.” No doubt Uncharted 4 will have
its detractors, but if the studio holds to its new vision, no
one will accuse it of repeating its past mistakes. In years to
come, when crudely sketched webcomics say ‘Everything
was Uncharted,’ the meaning will be very different.
