It's been nearly two months since Uncharted 2: Among Thieves came out and blew us away, and most of us are still talking about it. The PS3 exclusive more than lived up to expectations, but after the dust had settled and all was said and done, we had some more questions about the game. Thankfully, Naughty Dog's Arne Meyer took the time to answer our inquiries. Check out what one of the forces behind Uncharted 2 had to say about the game's development process, the intense critical reaction it has received, and what the future might hold for Nathan Drake.

What were your goals going into Uncharted 2: Among Thieves?

The overarching goal as we started production was to exceed the bar we set with UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune in every way we could – with the graphics, technology, story, gameplay and so on. We wanted to make the entire experience bigger and more awe-inspiring yet keep a solid sense of pacing and fun so that you wouldn’t want to put the controller down until you were done with the full experience of our game. And of course we wanted to add a full-featured multiplayer mode.

Were there any specific aspects from the first game that you knew you wanted to change, or keep the same?

There were a few key areas we definitely wanted to expand upon as we moved from UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune to UNCHARTED 2. One of the most important was creating environments where our gameplay could move seamlessly from traversal to combat, or even combine both! On top of that, we also wanted to “widen” our environments to open up your options when approaching combat situations. We thought to ourselves that one of Nathan Drake’s key skills is being able to climb just about anywhere, so why not give you the options to take advantage of this? To make this happen, we created environments that allowed you to climb up to gain new vantage points over the combat area or to flank or get the drop on enemies. Of course, once we started going down that path, we saw how many other things we could build upon, such as improving enemy AI systems to add an action-stealth element to our game and combining the ability to climb and shoot at the same – a concept we’ve been calling “traversal gunplay” – and so on. As you can see, that just one thing we wanted to build upon easily snowballed to a ton of other tweaks and additions to UNCHARTED 2.



Despite launching amidst a huge build-up, Uncharted 2 still managed to live up to, and even surpass, the hype surrounding it. The game currently has over 30 perfect scores on aggregate site Metacritic, which includes Gamervision's review score of 10. Did you expect the critical reaction to be so overwhelmingly positive?

As things started to take shape during our two years of development, we gained a certain degree of confidence that we were creating a great game that was ultimately fun to play. This came from how much effort we were putting into it, the internal feedback we were getting because of our collaborative development process and from the numerous play-testing sessions we hosted at Naughty Dog. But just because things felt good from that perspective, we know that doesn’t always mean everyone else may feel the same way. We got a hint of that from all the awards we received at the end of E3 and from the gamescom Cologne award we received as well. Even with all that recognition, I don’t think any of us quite expected the overwhelming amount of perfect scores we ended up receiving. In the end, it does feel great to receive those scores after all the hard work everyone at Naughty Dog put in day after day.

Both Uncharted games have been praised by many as being a pair of truly cinematic gaming experiences. What movies did the team use for inspiration?

We can’t really distill our inspirations down to some movies, or even one source of entertainment. Our development process is extremely collaborative and we encourage everyone to provide input into just about every aspect of our games. This means that we’re tapping into our collective range of influences throughout development, whether it’s books, movies, art, games, comic books – just about anything and everything. Beyond that, what you see in our game came from distilling our influences to draw out archetypes that are hallmarks of a variety of genres that fit with our game and our story.

If it were up to you, who would play the lead characters (Nathan, Chloe, Sully and Elena) in the upcoming Sony pictures feature film adaptation of Uncharted?

This is a tough question, only because we work so closely with our existing actors that it’s difficult to look beyond them to see who else may be perfect for those roles. For us, we found the perfect people to play each role in our games – that’s why we not only keep working with them, but work with them in such a close, collaborative way throughout the development of a game. No doubt that there are plenty of qualified actors who can take on those roles for the feature film, and we’re confident that Columbia and Arad Productions will find the best people for their film and for the UNCHARTED universe as a whole.



Were there any areas that had to be cut from the full version?

Because of our fluid and collaborative development process, we knew very early on if an area in UNCHARTED 2 was going to work or not, which prevented us from having to cut areas in the more traditional sense. There were several areas that we had to reduce in scope as we started to build them out, “The Monastery” immediately comes to mind. There was one part of the game that we were unsure we could pull off – the train sequence that starts at “Locomotion” was one of the first things we started working on in UNCHARTED 2 and it wasn’t until development was nearly complete that we were sure it would live up to the original vision.

Is it hard moving on to your next project after an experience like this?

Initially, it does seem a bit daunting to think about how we could possibly outdo everything we’ve accomplished to date from UNCHARTED 2! However, no matter what we’ve accomplished in the past, we have a great, collaborative development process, top-notch talent within Naughty Dog and a passion to make awesome games that are fun to play that all drive us forward to try new and bigger things with our games.

It has been announced that DLC is planned. Will there be any singleplayer content?

We’re currently not planning any single-player downloadable content for UNCHARTED 2. Our single-player experiences are very much driven by the stories we want to tell and we want to make sure we have the latitude to tell them in the best way possible. To us, that means creating a full-length story and experience. Not to mention that, given that UNCHARTED 2 filled up an entire 25GB Blu-ray disc, trying to create a solid experience that met with our quality standards for technology, graphics and story, and keep it to a reasonable download size would be quite the challenge!



Is there a chance of seeing some of the more supernatural enemies and elements of Uncharted moved to the co-op?

Nothing is out of the question. What is most important to us, as we create any part of our game, is whether it’s fun to play. If adding those elements and characters to our Competitive or Co-op modes make sense, from a gameplay and enjoyment point of view, and it fits within the UNCHARTED canon, then it’s definitely under consideration. We’ve already sort of skirted with that idea in the Crushing difficulty of our Co-op modes – all the NPC adversaries are skeletons!

How did the co-op evolve? Was there ever a time when it was going to be the full co-op campaign?

We always knew that we wanted to have a Co-op experience within the multiplayer experience of UNCHARTED 2. When we were first drawing up our specs for Co-op, we didn’t actually have any of the technology in our game engine yet, so we started off trying to shape what the Co-op experience would be like. We did know that we wanted to have multiple types of Co-op – one based on a survival element and another based around objectives within a light narrative element. Once we had a handle on what our technology was capable of and what our deadlines were, we created a Co-op game design based off of these initial specs. We ended up achieving far more than what we detailed in our designs – we added a third mode, Gold Rush, and not one but three extensive objective Co-op missions.

One of the things we did consider early on in development was implementing Co-op within our single-player campaign. What is most important in our campaign is being true to the story we want to tell with our protagonists. Without a doubt, UNCHARTED 2 is very much the story of Nathan Drake and we didn’t want to compromise on that experience. Because of this, our decision was simple – it just didn’t make sense to our story to try to fit in Co-op.

Can you give any details on what the future might hold for Nathan Drake, or perhaps where his next adventure might take him?

Well, we’ve just finished UNCHARTED 2, so we haven’t really thought about what lies in our future yet. We have been working on extensions to the UNCHARTED universe though, such as with the “Eye of Indra” motion comics we released recently on the PlayStation Network store… so whatever happens, there’s a lot out there that’s still left to explore.