Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Interview, Part One

EW: One of the things that we wanted to address right away was to strike a really strong balance between the action and the adventure components. I think people's expectations coming into the first game were that there'd be more adventure and less shooting. While we didn't want to move away from the fact that we are indeed a third-person shooter, we wanted to make sure people felt there was more of that spirit of adventure you've come to expect from the genre.

So it was a design challenge to honor the action elements, then pump the action up even more, without forgetting the adventure or alienating the people who wanted that sense of classic adventure.

AH: Yeah, and just thinking about the question as you asked it, I don't know that we said, "Let's not do that again." I think it was more like what Evan said, how could we get a better balance between some of the game elements so it didn't feel like we were moving from mode to mode. I think it was more a matter of "What did we do okay and could have done really well, if we put the effort behind it" So, for instance, trying to draw the characters deeper than we did the first time.

We were definitely playing off a lot of the traditions of the adventure genres. Some of the things I'd read on the message boards was that people loved the characters, but could also see they were drawn from traditional stereotypes. And although I never want to be heavy-handed with character development--I want to leave a lot to inference--I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into the characters at this point. I want people to say "This isn't a story I've seen a hundred times" or "This turns in a way I didn't expect it to." That these characters, while being drawn from certain traditional tropes, aren't playing out exactly as expected. That they're coming off more like real people. You see what I mean

GO: Yeah, the sense that I had in the first game was that despite the relationship exposition and development between Nathan and Elena and Sully, it was a little more Allan Quartermain, a little more lighthearted romp. Uncharted 2 on the other hand has this curious marketing point, which reads "An expanded cast of characters who reflect different facets of Drake’s character." That's an unusually insightful thing to say in a marketing bullet point, the notion that the game's dramatis personae really shape who Drake is, sort of like the characters in Shakespeare's King Lear, or at the extreme end, the characters in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.