Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Interview

We talk to Naughty Dog design lead Richard Lemarchand to find out more about one of the most promising games on the PlayStation 3. Incredible new screenshots inside!

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Kikizo: Why do you think it's been so hard for developers to tell compelling stories?

Lemarchand: Interactive design and storytelling are two different skill sets, and I think game developers often underestimate how much hard, detail-oriented work goes into telling the kind of story that you find in a great film.

Of course there have been a lot of games that have done a great job of telling stories, and we've always loved finding cool new ways to reconcile narrative and gameplay in Naughty Dog's games. Our awesome team of animators, writers and directors have been working hard for a long time now to create something that our inspirational acting talent can bring to life right beneath players' fingertips.

Kikizo: Nathan moves very naturally, and the whole game seems very lifelike. What is the secret sauce that's helping Naughty Dog push ahead here?

Lemarchand: If we told you that, it wouldn't be a secret! Seriously, our animation system, some great motion-capture data and some careful hand-animation have all combined with many long hours of gameplay control programming to create the smooth action you see in our trailers.

I guess it's 45 per cent inspiration, 45 per cent perspiration, and 10 per cent secret sauce!

Kikizo: You've said that you're trying to bring the best of adventuring in books and movies to games. How do you plan to do that?

Lemarchand: At the beginning of the project, in our pre-production phase, we spent a lot of time analysing the adventure story genre. We looked back to some of the genre's roots, including "pulp" novels and comics from the '20s and '30s, and old adventure movies including the famous Republic adventure serials; as we looked, we started to figure out what it is about those stories that engages people.

We found a lot of things that the stories had in common, like chasing or being chased by the bad guys, making alliances with unusual characters, getting caught in sticky situations, nasty scrapes and cliff-hangers (often literally!), and a whole lot of out-of-frying-pan-into-fire situations. We like the recent trend in adventure films that include historical mystery, and we've been working hard to embrace all the classic genre conventions in a cool, contemporary way.

Kikizo: From what I've read, it seems that you'll be using context sensitive controls. Why did you choose to go this way?

Lemarchand: The controls are only context-sensitive in the sense that some special reactions will result from the player's actions dependent on the setting - we're being very careful to create a control system that the player can learn quickly, and that behaves intuitively and predictably. We think that straying from that path is a bad thing.

Kikizo: Will you have dynamic difficulty settings?

Lemarchand: There are some things that it's too early to talk about, and I'm afraid this is one of them ... watch this space!

Kikizo: Will you have crate puzzles?

Lemarchand: No crate puzzles in our game! But there'll plenty of other environmental interactions to keep people puzzling.

Kikizo: How many locations are planned?

Lemarchand: Because we've recreated our famous level-streaming technology for the PS3, you could argue that the game is one big level! Most of the game takes place on a mysterious island in a far-flung corner of the globe, but rest assured that there's much, much more to see than just dense jungle and terrifying cliff-side plunges to the ocean.

Kikizo: What sort of game length are you leaning towards?

Lemarchand: We'll be making more announcements about the total play time of our game later in the year; so again, watch this space! Suffice to say that we won't let players down, and we'll hit the kind of quality and quantity bars that fans of Naughty Dog's games have come to expect.

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