[Review] making of a perfect sequel

[DaLveN @CSBD]

At the end of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Nathan Drake is returning home a hero. He's defeated the bad guy, won back the affections of his true love, Elena, and even uncovered the lost kingdom of Shambhala… albeit not long before triggering its collapse into permanent ruin. Nobody's perfect."So, where do we go from here?" asks Elena, one arm tenderly looped through Drake's as the enamoured pair watch the sun dip behind the snow-capped crests of the Himalayas. "I don't know," replies our protagonist, coyly, "I haven't thought that far ahead."Key Info(Image credit: Naughty Dog)Game Uncharted 2Developer Naughty DogPublisher Sony Interactive EntertainmentPlatforms PS3, PS4Release 2009It's the epitomical scene for this PlayStation icon; the charismatic, ever optimistic improv artist who – let's face it – is basically that one friend in every Whatsapp group who never responds to messages unless it's to apologise for forgetting your birthday. More than that, though, Drake's comments are a fitting reflection of developer Naughty Dog's own piecemeal approach to making consistently high calibre games, as explained by Uncharted 2's director, Bruce Straley."Everything we do is on a one-at-a-time basis at Naughty Dog," reveals Straley. "We've never considered any project as part of a franchise production, and that's mainly because we can't think that far ahead. We therefore tried to make Uncharted 2 a sequel that you could pick up cold without having played Drake's Fortune, easily accessing the characters, the world, and the story without knowing anything about Drake's history."

Greatness from small beginnings

Straley had previously worked on 2007's Uncharted: Drake's Fortune as co-art director, but – after development on that game had seen director Amy Hennig overburdened with sole leadership of the project – a frank conversation with Naughty Dog's co-president Evan Wells saw him promoted to head up production on the sequel alongside Hennig as development partners. In preparation, the pair (along with Neil Druckmann and Josh Scherr, who made up the rest of the project's core writing team), attended one of author Robert McKee's famous storytelling seminars in downtown Los Angeles and – according to Straley – it was here where the seeds of Uncharted 2 were really born."I vividly remember having a clear 'eureka!' moment, and all of us engaging in these really rich discussions during the seminar breaks about the hero's three arc structure, and this idea of the gap between expectation and results. You set up an expectation for the protagonist, and something obstructs the way there and forces them to overcome that obstacle. That's storytelling 101, but we also realised then and there, that's game design too. So to tether those story beats to the gameplay in a more meaningful way was the foundation that got this team of four people to really look at Uncharted 2 as a holistic experience."

In light of this newfound epiphany, Naughty Dog looked to the film industry for Uncharted 2's pre-production recruitment drive, in the hopes of furnishing that cinematic flair it was aiming for. Hollywood was just up the road from its sunny Santa Monica HQ, after all, and Robh Ruppel was thus brought on as the game's lead art director, having previously worked in visual development on a number of big screen Disney animations."I had been playing a lot of games with my daughter before I joined the studio," Ruppel tells me, "and coincidentally a bunch of those games had been Naughty Dog titles, so to be part of that team for their next big endeavour was a hugely exciting prospect." As lead art director, Ruppel was responsible for taking Hennig and Straley's new, cineliterate vision, and turning it into a consistent visual language. "All the locations had to have a certain reality to them. That's something that Bruce was really emphatic about. He had this great phrase, 'keep everything core', meaning he didn't want it to be too concept heavy or imaginary, so whatever we did we had to research heavily."To create Shambala, for example, Ruppel's team pored over the annals of Mesopotamian history and architecture to conjure a completely imagined place that nevertheless looked just as much a work of reality as one of fantasy.  "Trying to come up with a unique location that's never been seen before, but also feels like it fits within our world and has a believable history... it's hard to design something from scratch that has all those elements," he admits. "We eventually combined the two motifs – the pyramid and the ziggurat – to form the basis of our environmental storytelling, to make sure Shambala felt like it could appear in the pantheon of great monuments of the ancient world."

Stein himself remembers working with the likes of Straley, Hennig, and Druckmann as a tough but edifying experience, all of whom who he describes as "extremely motivated, intense, driven, but also a lot of fun.""One great success that I would credit all of them with is creating a strong sense of what we were making, even beyond the usual learnings that you get from working on a sequel,'' Stein tells me. "Everyone in the studio just had a really good sense of the characters, the tone,  and the standard of quality we were aiming for. They all worked hard to make sure everyone was instilled with that so we could make well informed micro-decisions along the way, without necessarily having to consult them for every single design choice."That philosophy to keep almost everything in Among Thieves "on the stick", though, is exactly what elevated Uncharted 2 above both its predecessors and contemporaries in the genre. 10 years later, Straley can safely say that the game's achievements were worth the uphill battle in winning everyone over to his vision, not to mention vaulting all the extra design hurdles that came with it."If there's an emotional beat or piece of exposition that player absolutely needs to hear, then it can be in a cutscene but, aside from those, if you can put the experience on the stick, involving the player in the moment, that is truly using our medium in the best possible way. You're making a game that's telling a story rather than making a story that happens to be in a game."

Like Ruppel, Uncharted 2 was also Jonathan Stein's first project in 'The Kennel' (the playful term of endearment that Naughty Dog employees use to refer to their spacious studio building), but his previous experience at Monolith Productions and Nintendo set him up well for work as a Game Designer on Nathan Drake's sophomore adventure. In conversation, he looks back on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves with great fondness, nostalgia, and pride."I remember first showing up at the studio and being almost overwhelmed with the excitement amongst the team,'' says Stein. "There were so many passionate and motivated people, all of whom were eager to think about the game holistically and outside of their disciplines, which is something that's hard to foster at a studio. I, for example, was personally thrilled about the prospect of getting to work with the third person perspective, and the camera work that came with it, as I'd done a lot of first person games prior to that, which has its limitations when it comes to cinematography."Stein and the design team were responsible for building spaces and sequences that balanced Uncharted's core mechanics of combat, platforming, and puzzles with ambitious, Hollywood-style set pieces, all while closely following Straley's core design philosophy "to keep the player in control as much as possible.""It's something I really pushed to put into practice on Among Thieves," explains Straley, who admits that he can be a bit of a "bull in a china shop" when it comes to collective decision making in the development pipeline. "If there was something that I didn't like in the design department, then I would go in and express myself quite clearly about that. I could have been nicer, but that's hindsight, I guess!"