Thinking Out Loud – Repairing Uncharted 2

January 5th, 2018

In the last few years I’ve moved away from including game repair ideas in my critiques as any suggestions on my part ultimately reflect my own tastes. However, these alternative visions can still make for good food for thought, particular when the my own views are quite different from the game in question. Uncharted 2 is one such game. The following notes were written back in 2013.

All Gunplay and No Interplay

Realistic gunplay lacks interplay, so when the player can fire high-impact, fast-moving projectiles at their enemies, there’s not much room for back-and-forth interactions. The inherent limitations of bullets can potentially limit the dynamism of the gunplay. Uncharted 2 already includes a few dynamic interactions (such as shooting soldiers off ledges), but not many. The following ideas could make the shooting much more responsive:

Destructible cover. When an enemy’s cover is shot / blown out, they’re forced to retreat to another hiding spot.
Stunning riot shield holders. When Drake fires a shotgun or any other high-powered weapon at a riot shield, the holder could stops moving and shooting and hold their position for a brief second. By exploiting the stun effect, the player can inch their way around the holder so as to catch them with their body exposed.
Leg moves. Shoot a guard in the foot or leg and they’ll fall to the ground where they’re vulnerable. Drake could then shoot them again to finish them off, knock them out (contextual attack), or they could shoot Drake or crawl away. To communicate the enemy’s fallen state to the player, the henchmen could fall in a particular way or yell something like “I’m down”. Once they’re on the floor, they could make a shuffling noise as they try to move or get up. This would make it easier for the player to find their position.
Reactive enemies. Shooting an armoured enemy’s bullet-proof vest could prompt a change in behaviour. For example, they could act more aggressive after being shot. This would give them a raging bull persona.
Drake is knocked back when an enemy falls on him.
More opportunities to change the environment, such as shooting an aquarium to make a floor slippery.

These recommendations would not only make the game more dynamic, realistic, and engaging, but they’d also allow the player to explore the inventive side of Drake’s personality, creating their own mini-set pieces.

Bending Realism for the Sake of Difficulty

Uncharted 2‘s hard mode floods the battlefield with soldiers which can sustain multiple head shots and take incredible amounts of damage. By the end of the game, the number of these superhumans ramps up significantly. This lazy form of difficulty adjustment has a number of problems:

the guards disobey their visual form as human beings
the levels generally weren’t optimised around an increased enemy load, so the bigger intake can create bottlenecks in the challenges. Although the experience is more difficult, the gameplay balance can be inferior.
the changes primarily demand better aiming from the player, but don’t address other important skills such as strategising, spatial awareness, etc.

Scalable difficulty would allow the game to better address the needs of amateur and advance players while also fitting within the game’s existing context. Here is one potential application:

Branching paths. Near the end of the freer gameplay challenges, the game could present the player with two or more paths. As Drake approaches each path, he or the AI companion could comment on its difficulty by saying something like “Sully, are you sure this is the safest way to the old market?” Once the player chooses a path, Drake or the AI companion could then add a few more quips to reinforce the challenge ahead. For example, Sully could later respond “Keep your wits about you, kid”. The branching paths would funnel the player into separate areas optimised for player difficulty.

Nothing Climbing

Spot an obvious-looking grapple point and push a button to have Drake jump to it, that’s about all that’s involved Uncharted 2‘s climbing sequences. The problem isn’t the contextual nature of navigation or the mechanics, which are direct and generally intuitive. It’s just too easy.

The developers could increase the challenge by de-optimising Drake’s climbing mechanics. Zelda: Skyward Sword does this with the energy metre (which adds a timing and risk/reward element to climbing). This widget could be a good fit for Uncharted.

Alternatively, the developers could repurpose the climbing sequences so as to reduce the number of cutscenes and support the game’s primary function, shooting. Most climbing sections precede shootouts, so they’re well positioned to function as a scaffold. Climbing sequences could give the player a good view of the upcoming arena and inform them of enemy patrols, cover spots, and the locations of explosive barrels prior to arrival. This reorientation in climbing would positively impact the game in a number of ways:

The climbing sections could potentially be more engaging as the player is likely to gather intel and think through their approach for the next conflict while simultaneously moving Drake from ledge to ledge. The structure encourages the player to take a more active role.
If the developers also reduced the number of checkpoints, then a good balance could be achieved between making the player complete more than one large confrontation in succession and supporting them with important visual information pre-combat.
The time gap between viewing an arena and engaging in combat encourages the player to maintain the information in their short-term memory, which again demands more active engagement in the game. The developers could further tease this out by increasing the duration of retention or presenting pieces of information out of order.
The added perspective on the battlefield addresses the limitations of the over-the-shoulder viewpoint and would minimise the player’s need to manually spin the camera to scan the environment.
Many of the game’s dialogue sequences could be converted to radio chatter that plays over the climbing sequences.

In order to facilitate the use of climbing as scaffolding, the levels would need to be reworked to include more dimensionality or openings through which Drake could climb past undetected. More opportunities to shoot whilst climbing or even shoot to open up areas for climbing would go a long way in adding more dynamic interactions to these rather static sequences.

Functional Approach to Chapter Design

Critics generally believe the two train chapters to be the best sequence in the game. Unlike most other chapters where the gameplay lacks a coherent direction, Locomotion and Tunnel Vision benefit from a functional design. The developers based the two chapters around a clear set of interactions which they then apply to a variety of increasingly complex gameplay scenarios (Adventures in Games Analysis will contain a full critique of Locomotion). Here are two theoretical examples of how Uncharted 2‘s levels could be orientated around a particular set of interactions.

A sandstorm engulfs a desert outpost. The enemies are wearing protective masks, so they’re not blinded by sand in their eyes. The player can still see, of course, but Drake must cover his eyes and therefore cannot aim from the over-the-shoulder perspective. Drake must keep the militia at bay while he waits for the storm to pass. [Blind firing and shooting from the hip].
Drake enters a mansion to retrieve an historic artefact only to trip an alarm when he finally claims the prized possession. Already deep inside the premises, the player must go back the way they came, fighting off a squad of heavily armed guards in the process. However, since supplies are scant, Drake is forced to use a lone riot shield as portable cover as he makes his way towards a backdoor exit. [Riot shield and armoured enemy types].

By incorporating some more dynamic elements into the shooting gameplay, the developers could also increase the sophistication of the gameplay challenges while still keeping the action grounded. For example, using grenades to flush enemies out of cover (AI) or exploiting the lack of mobility of enemies caught in knee-high water (environmental element).

Conclusion

Gunplay and interplay, scalable difficulty, easy climbing gameplay, and functionally organised gameplay are issues which extend beyond Uncharted 2 and into a variety of other games (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Timesplitters 2). Likewise, I took many of my suggestions from games which I believe address these challenges well (Resident Evil 4, Evil Within, Perfect Dark, and Zelda: Skyward Sword). Of course, without implementing these ideas and testing them in practice, they are simply food for thought.

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Uncharted 2 – I’m Not Here, This Isn’t Really Happening

January 3rd, 2018

Player agency separates video games from passive media such as film and literature. Unlike these other art forms, players of video games must exert skill so as to overcome challenges. And so playing a video game requires effort and commitment, much like any other skill-based task. However, not everyone wants to sit down after a hard day of work and put their learning and mastery to the test. And so in the last decade or so, the games industry has seen an increase in titles in the AAA games space which attempt to appeal to a wider audience at the expense of player agency and gameplay. The Uncharted series stands out in this regard. In a series of livestream discussions surveying games criticism on the Uncharted series, critic and game developer Richard Terrell concluded that Uncharted 4 (the latest game in the series) is a “super casual game”, citing the simplified shooting sequences and increased proportion of low intensity climbing and walking sections. While I haven’t played Uncharted 4, I would argue that the series has always sought to appeal to a wider audience by creating a more passive game experience. The following examples from Uncharted 2 may seem slight on their own, but together they play a significant role in reducing the player’s agency and the potential interactivity.

Too Many Cutscenes

According to How Long to Beat, most players need 10.5 hours of game time to beat Uncharted 2, yet around 3 hours of this time consists of non-interactive cutscenes. To put this into perspective, for roughly every 3 minutes of play time, the player will spend 1 minute watching a video. While well written and engaging, these sequences mostly consist of characters in dialogue, exchanging information which perhaps could have been integrated elsewhere. After all, Uncharted 2‘s plot isn’t terribly complicated.

Overuse of Checkpoints

For every significant gunfight won, the player reaches a checkpoint. While this measure keeps the game moving forward, the constant checkpointing also shortens the sustained length of time during which the player must play well in order to overcome a challenge. As a result, the player has little to lose going in to most confrontations and thus the game gives licence to more thoughtless play. The fast turn around between failure and attempt also reduces the intervening time where players subconsciously internalise mistakes and formulate new strategies. With Drake’s recharging health and ability to sustain multiple gunshots as well as few hard locks forcing the player to engage with each challenge, the generous checkpointing only makes running past enemies an even more viable strategy.

Early Clue Prompts

If the player waits around in a given area for more than a minute, a clue prompt will appear on screen. Activating the prompt makes the camera frame the next point of progress. The hint usually doesn’t spoil any puzzles; however, I find that it chimes in way too quickly. Oftentimes throughout my playthrough, I’d be notified of a free hint before I even had a solid grasp of my surroundings—and once it pops up, I doubt few players could resist using it. In this way, the clue prompts sap some of the exploration out of the gameplay.

Best of Friends

The developers turned friendly fire off, which means that the player can’t accidentally shoot Drake’s companions. However, the AI generally tends to occupy the space to the sides of most confrontations and Uncharted’s third person view and open combat environments provide the player with plenty of visual and physical room to easily manoeuvre around the other characters (there are, for example, few firefights which take place in narrow corridors). So in this sense turning off friendly fire cuts out the effort needed to work around your team mates. Other third-person shooters such as Resident Evil 4 turn on friendly fire and thereby allow the AI character to add an extra wrinkle to the gameplay. In Uncharted 2 though, Drake’s companions don’t change the gameplay in any meaningful way.

Bubble Wrapped Realism

Despite the painstaking visual realism, Uncharted 2‘s environments are for the most part static window dressing. Animals, lights, glass, and vases, among other things, don’t react realistically when shot. Only in specific instances where the game designers need Drake to shoot something that isn’t Eastern-European or explosive will the item respond.

Not only do the player and game world lack interplay, but the game elements don’t react to each other either, as I found out when I got Drake to hold a gas canister over an open flame. For contrast, in the first level of Syphon Filter lights, windows, bottles, computers, padlocks, and police cars all react realistically to gunfire. Uncharted 2 can’t even match the interactive realism of a PSone game. Amazing.

Conclusion

Aside from these examples, Uncharted 2‘s low intensity climbing sections and the lack of dynamic interactions within the gunplay significantly reduce the interactive experience. However, these issues relate more to Uncharted 2‘s core gameplay, and so I’ve saved these topics for the next repair-focused article.

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