Naughty Dog: Uncharted 3 Is “The Pinnacle Of What We’ve Reached”

Naughty could be called the best games developer at the moment. The studio’s responsible for one of the greatest games ever made in Uncharted 2, and is currently gearing up for even a bigger release: Uncharted 3. But success doesn’t come easy, and the developer contends one must not rest on his laurels. No. Instead he must work extremely hard. It’s the reason the developer now thinks Uncharted 3 is the “pinnacle” of what they’ve achieved, and moving forward, the tradition of hard work will continue.

“It’s the pinnacle of what we’ve reached,” U3’s co-lead designer Richard Lemarchand told The Gaming Liberty in a recent interview referring to the upcoming game. “You can trace the building blocks of Uncharted all the way back to the Crash Bandicoot series on the PSX. In a way, they were cinematic story action games too. Do you remember the sequence of gameplay where Crash would run towards the camera with the boulder chasing him? Well, that camera angle was chosen so that we could deliberately show the expression of panic on Crash’s face as he ran away from that big boulder, and that, in a simpler way, is a same kind of story telling devise that we are using today in Uncharted.”

When asked what are the lessons learnt in former generations about games development and achieving massive critical success, Lemarchand contended one must work extremely hard, and people must learn to inspire each other.

“I think not resting on your laurels is an important one,” he continued. “We try not to repeat ourselves with each game we make. We try to inspire each other to come up with bigger ideas and more outrageous technological feats. My co-lead game designer Jacob Minkoff tells a good story about the conception of the cruise ship level you’ve seen from Uncharted 3 at E3.

He came up with this idea for a whole level set on a cruise ship floating through the sea and half way through the level, a huge hole would be torn in the ship’s hull by an explosion and the ship would take on water and begin to sink. That obviously implied a lot of different technical challenges, dynamic sea simulations and the ability for us to sink a boat in real time. Jacob says that he drew together a group of programmers and other people from around the studio to pitch this idea and they initially looked at him like he was crazy. He says that he probably was crazy.

I think lots of people would dream about a sequence like that but not many people would have the confidence to just go for it. So Jacob says that those programmers went away and spoke among themselves for 20 minutes and came back and said ‘alright, let’s go for it!’. I think it’s that sort of willingness to reach for a higher goal that has really helped to make each of the successively more impressive and exciting games in the Uncharted franchise.”

Uncharted 3′s multiplayer is now live, only buy a subway drink and you’ll be given a code. If you live in Europe, come Tuesday, it’ll be available there through PS Plus. The game itself goes on sale November 1st exclusively for PS3.

The full interview can be found through the TGL link above.