As the Uncharted franchise makes the leap from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4 with A Thief’s End, Game Directors Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann were interviewed by Game Informer, where Druckmann answered the question of whether or not they understand how to make an Uncharted game at this point:
Not this Uncharted. This Uncharted still feels like, you know, now we have our vertical slice. We’ve found our flow and the voice of this game, if you will. And now it’s like, ‘Okay, well how do you expand that? How do you flesh that out for the entire experience, making sure it’s got its proper pacing, it’s got its up and downs?’ It seems like an eternity from now until when we’ll be finished with it, but it’s a year.
In terms of what they’ve learned from that vertical slice, Straley admitted, “Making Uncharted 4 is hard. Making every game is really hard; it’s never easy.” Druckmann added that the PlayStation Experience demo was “kind of a mess” four weeks ago, and it caused them to make certain choices in terms of mechanics to go forward and release it on time.
Going further back into the development of A Thief’s End, Druckmann admitted that “when we first came on the project, there were some areas that were so big and so large that you lost any sense of pacing and you weren’t sure of where you were going. And again, that’s not something we wanted to play, so there were some adjustments made. Likewise, we’re not against linear storytelling or linear gameplay; I’m sure there will be parts of the game that will be more linear than the others, there’s going to be parts that open up much wider than what you see in the demo.” All in all, he says it comes down to how the moment fits into the greater scheme of what they’re trying to tell.
Druckmann finished up the interview by saying, “We’re making a Naughty Dog game. If you’ve enjoyed anything we’ve done in the past we’re going to try and up our game and make another great game.”
[Source: Game Informer]
