Evan Wells Interview - Page 3

The first Uncharted takes a swing towards Doom territory towards the end. Is that going to happen in this game?

Part of that is that there are mystical elements to the world that don't necessarily have a supernatural explanation. We really try to walk that X-Files line where there could be a real world explanation. So I don't know if we made the point clear enough in the first game. But the idea was that there was this virus trapped inside that sarcophagus, or that mummy, for thousands of years. It was released, and of course these people have no immunities built up to this virus and it has some really nasty effects.

People that survived the effects inbred and they created those creatures that we saw in the first game. That was the more scientific explanation as opposed to the mystical one, that they are just demons.

Yeah, like some gateway to hell has been opened.

Exactly. So, that is something that we always want to tie in. We always want to make sure that there is a fairly rational and plausible explanation through science for these things, but we also want to give ourselves some liberty of exploring some slightly more fantastic elements.

Are you guys adding any sort of online multiplayer element -- time trials or anything like that?

We definitely want to enrich the player's experience in as many ways as we possibly can. Right now though our focus is to enrich it through creating a much deeper and enjoyable single-player experience.

We are going to try to add some time to that as well as make it really deep and give you a lot of reasons for replaying it, whether it is through Trophies, whether it is through expansion of our medal system, which we added in the first game. Both of those will coexist, so there will be even more things to try to unlock with the bonus material we had on the disc. We are going to do that again.

As far as other online elements, we will see what the future holds.

One of the cool elements from the first game was using the SIXAXIS controller to arc your grenades, and then balancing, although we think there were actually only a couple of logs he walked across . We noticed in this demo you ran across a balance beam. We couldn't tell if you guys were using the SIXAXIS at all. Are you guys going to incorporate that again? Will the same grenade mechanic be there? Anything new?

Yeah. We actually rethought our grenade throwing mechanic from the first game. It is really not a comment on the SIXAXIS as much as it was a comment on the availability of the grenade; having it be a third weapon that you selected, I think, was enough of a deterrent that people rarely used it, because it was so much easier to just go left or right and use your single hand gun or two hand gun.

That third weapon slot became one too many. So we have opted to give the grenade its very own button. So therefore...

There is no aiming or arcing?

Yeah. So we took out the SIXAXIS control from that just so you could access it really quick with just the click of a button. We do a lot of algorithmic checks to make sure that we know your proposed target. We fire towards your reticule essentially.

The great thing about that is you can, while you have got your gun out and you are aiming at somebody shooting and you decide to throw a grenade, you can do that with one smooth motion. You never have to put your gun away, take out your grenade and then throw it.

We just wanted to make the grenades a much more integrated part of your arsenal. So that is why we opted to do that.

What about the balance moments?

The balance moments are also removed from the SIXAXIS. We are doing it all from the analog stick. It is something that we are just really trying to find the sweet spot of, where SIXAXIS doesn't actually end up feeling like a tacked-on gimmick, but actually feels like an integrated enhancement to your controls.

The first game didn't require a mandatory install. Can the same be said for Uncharted 2?

That is the plan. That goes back to our goal of providing this seamless experience. We want people to feel like they are playing a movie. When you get a new Blu-ray or DVD you don't have to install it. You just sit down and start enjoying it right away.

So, for as long as we can we are going to try to avoid any install. But what we do instead is we take advantage of the hard drive in other ways. Essentially, we are installing as you are playing. So, as you are playing through the game, we know what part is coming up next because it is a roughly linear experience. We are basically just caching out the hard drive while you are playing and getting the advantage of faster load times of your hard drive without the install.

When Uncharted came out it had these lush green jungle environments. Everything was brightly lit. In this one it seems like you guys are going all over the map with a lot of different locations. Based on what we say today in the demo, in the war-torn city in Nepal, it looked very colorful. Is Drake going to be encountering different environments that are darker?

We are basically going to be all over the map in terms of color palettes and lighting tones. We are really driven by the story more than anything else. We just sort of take advantage of the environments that the story affords us to visit.

You are going to be going from some dark underground tunnels to some brightly lit war-torn streets to lush green jungle and swamp environments to the icy caves and mountains of the Himalayas, visiting some really interesting man-made structures in those as well.

So yeah, the color palette is going to be very diverse, even more so than the first one.