Over the weekend, Justin Richmond, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception Game Director, and Robert Cogburn, Lead Multiplayer Designer, held a Reddit AMA, following in the footsteps of Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, who did one for The Last of Us.
As with all AMAs, we’ve placed everything in a question and answer format below, with the questions edited down for easier reading:
Justin Richmond
Are there any plans for future PS Vita games?
We have no plans to develop on Vita at this moment.
What do you think when you receive a new piece of hardware like the PS4? Do you plan to use the full power at first, or gradually use the power of the console over time?
We are always trying to use the maximum power of the machine, but it takes time. Every game you learn more about how to use it, the idiosyncrasies, etc.
Which feature/spec of the PS4 are you most excited about as developers?
More power. More and faster RAM.
Commitment to indies. Commitment to games in general!
It’s a killer machine.
Have you decided to utilize the streaming component of the PS4 in your next game?
I am really excited about this component of the hardware. We haven’t started thinking about it yet, but it is a really cool feature.
Is Naughty Dog going to stick to serious games like The Last of Us and Uncharted?
We will continue to make the games that we want to play. For now that is character based, narrative driven games. That could change in the future.
How many people work at Naughty Dog?
Around 200 and growing.
Have you ever considered killing off a main character?
Anything is on the table. We try to do what’s best for the story we are trying to tell. We never walk in saying, “Well this has to happen.” We find things along the way that changes the way we see things. Sometimes that involves a death, sometimes it doesn’t.
Was there ever a competitive Borneo map that was made?
In Uncharted 2 I made one, but we never shipped it. It just wasn’t fun. I tried to make it work, but the design just never came together. So we tossed it.
Robert Cogburn
How long was the development of Uncharted 3?
It was a short 24 months on Uncharted 3.
Will Uncharted 4 happen on PS4? Also, what do you think of the PS4 in general?
If I said anything about what we’re doing right now it wouldn’t be exciting.
The PS4 is awesome. It gives us the chance to do a lot of things we’ve been talking about for some time. You’ll be in awe when you play it.
Is there anything you guys wanted to add or takeaway from Uncharted 3?
I was in charge of the multiplayer side of things.
Add? More Awesome.
Takeaway? Less Epic.
I wish we had more time to offer a coop experience that had levels unique to it – we had to work with the level layouts from single-player.
For competitive, a big takeaway is don’t change a lot when game is already out!
Do you like the idea of Naughty Dog sticking with character based, narrative driven games? Let us know in the comments below.
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