Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End interview

Off the back of the demo yesterday, I wanted to talk a little about the dynamic interactions between allies and enemies. When we were in stealth we had Sam and Sully jump in and take out a few enemies. How do you balance that AI, so they’re helping out without completely doing the job for you?

AM: All of our AI systems, especially in combat, they’re very systematic and very based on what’s happening at the time. There’s a lot of refinement, trying to find that everything is acting as it should, that your allies aren’t running out of cover, trying to figure out what the player is trying to do.

We keep playing those scenarios over and over again, trying to make sure they’re helpful but not too helpful. In the overall spectrum, you don’t want them to be detrimental, but you don’t want to be too helpful. A lot of that is the continual tweaking of the AI and their routines because it’s systemic, it’s very based on what’s happening at that moment. You can’t plan for every eventuality. It doesn’t really work that way. It’s almost like there’s a slider and different variables, you start tweaking them and all of a sudden the AI is taking over too much, so we tweak it a little further to counter that. “

My colleague and I got our hands on the demo and both had totally different experiences with the AI. During his playthrough, Sam and Sully were taking too much control over the situation, killing enemies before he could get to them, whereas it worked as intended for me. In one situation, I was cornered by a curious guard and Sully came out of nowhere and took the thug out from behind. It was really cinematic.

At times, the AI felt so clever, I felt like I was playing online co-op. I was wondering whether co-op campaign was ever considered during development of Uncharted 4. Was it ever tested?

Nah, it’s always been single player. It goes back to the philosophy of how we wanted to treat character development and narrative in the game. We’re always trying to focus on Nathan Drake. That’s why you always play as Nathan Drake, there are only other characters so they can draw out different aspects of Drake’s personality. You have to make them react accordingly to whatever situation you’re in. Everything is built for that single player experience, to draw you to learn more about Drake himself.

Uncharted is one of those games where you’re just as happy to watch someone else play it as you are yourself.

Recently, news broke about Bruce and Neil revisiting old The Last of Us 2 concepts after the single player DLC for Uncharted 4 is completed. Past DLC featured little story, mostly single player and co-op challenges, but with Bruce and Neil on board for Uncharted 4’s DLC, will we see more story driven content? Is the DLC going to extend the narrative past the main campaign, or is Uncharted 4’s campaign final?

So that’s the challenge. Without going into it too much, the challenge we’ve set up for ourselves; once the story ends, how does that single chapter DLC fit in with everything else? That’s a question we haven’t answered so far. That’s going to be something we still have to figure out. Obviously, it does precedent an interesting position where we say, you know, this is the closing chapter, but we’re not saying “we’re never working on Uncharted again” because we’re obviously working on the smaller DLC chapter, but then how does that fit into everything? How does it fit into the timeline, what story are we going to tell, but we really don’t have an idea. These are all the questions we need to begin asking ourselves. But, you know, I think that’s really in the back of Bruce and Neil’s minds at the moment. It’s the last thing they need to worry about so close to release.

Bruce and Neil’s fingerprints are noticeable in the demo we played. Uncharted has always had great dialogue, but the inane chatter between Sully, Sam and Drake during downtime really reminded me of those moments with Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us. Can you identify any influences from The Last of Us that carried over to Uncharted 4?

“It’s not that much really. It’s funny you say that, because that chatter you mention has always been a part of Uncharted. This is just the next evolution of it. We’re just getting a lot better at it. There isn’t a lot that directly carried over from The Last of Us, beyond the fact that TLOU is the last game we completed and we learn from every game that we work on. There are different aspects of it where we say, that was interesting or we’ve done that thing better than we’ve ever done before and we use that for the foundation for Uncharted 4. Two most direct things are; our engine, because TLOU helped us port our engine over to PS4. Even before Uncharted 4 some basis to our tech and tools pipeline was helped by TLOU. And I think we carried on some aspects of the AI routines. Because the TLOU AI routines were a result from improving upon the Uncharted 3 AI routines, and then again for 4.

When I sit back and I look at everything we tried to do 1, 2, 3, The Last of Us and Uncharted 4, you see a lot of the same concepts, just pushed further with each iteration. We’ve learnt about our pacing, taking high-action moments and slowing them right down. We’ve learnt not to be afraid about taking our time. We toyed around with pacing in Uncharted 2 and 3, and really pushed it with The Last of Us. We slowed down the pacing for The Last of Us and really took it to the extreme, which wouldn’t have worked out with Uncharted 4. We’re expanding on things that have worked for past games, say the slow-mo in the Tibet scene in Uncharted 2, we’re now more comfortable expanding on that for Uncharted 4.

Looking forward, is there any particular feature in Uncharted 4 that the team is super proud of and likely to carry over to Naughty Dog’s next game? Maybe something new, say vehicles, that haven’t featured in a Naughty Dog game since Jak X.

The vehicle aspect is great for us. Because it’s something we haven’t tackled before and we’re feeling really good about it. We learned a lot from it. Not only in terms of how to make a vehicle drive well, and something to take you from point A to point B but also to use it as part of the narrative, part of the problem solving scenarios.

I think there’s a lot of stuff we learnt from that especially. For us it was a huge step forward in terms of working on the PS4, being able to figure out how far we can push the visual quality and make it feel like it’s in the real world. For example the textures for the rocks you saw in the preview sequence, that really impressed me. Rocks are always really difficult to do in any game. It’s a really easy thing to get wrong. The team’s really done a great job with textures and the level of detail, and even draw distance. A lot of these things we’ve been trying to push for a while, but now it feels like we’ve come into our own and they are things we would like to keep expanding on. The vehicles is probably the best example of that though.

Were there any huge problems introducing vehicles that the team ran into? Any moment they thought it might not work?

I don’t think there was ever a moment we thought it wouldn’t work. It was definitely something where we realised it was a very ambitious thing to do because we knew we had to get the technology and the physics right, and get the feel of driving right, but it was also like, where do we place this into the game so it fits with the narrative. Because now with a vehicle right, the idea is, well that means we can open up the space. One of the reasons why we picked the section for the recent preview, is to answer the question, can we give you a really broad environment and not make it too slow, can we give you the opportunity to explore and still make you want to progress through the story and not feel like there’s too much of a break. With the Uncharted games, we always want you to feel so invested in the story, to the point that you want to finish it in one sitting, there isn’t a natural break point where you say “Oh okay I’m done with this chapter, I’m going to put the controller down and come back to it. We always want you to keep going forward. That was the biggest challenge. Can we create this broad environment where you can drive and jump out and do what you want and not feel like there’s too much of a down time and you think ‘Oh that felt good, I’ll grab some dinner then maybe play some more”.

I just finished Uncharted 3 in three sittings.

That’s exactly what we’re trying to do. That feeling of ‘just one more chapter’.

Back to the jeep. In our preview, the characters (Nate, Sully and Drake) all interact with the vehicle and have unique dialogue related to the jeep. As you mentioned, the vehicle is a part of the narrative, a part of the puzzle solving process. So we’re not going to see any GTA moments where we can just hijack the closest car or motorbike.

Right, we’re not a driving game and that goes back to your previous question. We thought ‘how to we introduce this so it’s not a driving game’...

...but so it fits with the narrative.

Yes.

So, will we be driving other vehicles in the game?

(Silence)