Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series is renowned for its brilliant set pieces. In fact, Naughty Dog as a studio is renowned for its brilliant set pieces. But while each game under the PlayStation studio’s belt has its standout moments, there’s one game that boasts the most set pieces: Uncharted 3.
As far as the Uncharted series goes, Uncharted 3 maybe has too many set pieces. While many think of the game’s iconic plane crash or even the burning mansion, there’s a significant number of additional set pieces that bring a rather stop-start nature to the game’s story.
As Uncharted and The Last of Us designer Benson Russell told us for our FRVR Podcast, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Uncharted 2 were designed with one or two major set pieces in mind with story as the main focus. With Uncharted 3, the entire game was constructed around set pieces in an attempt to one-up the second game in the series.
“Set pieces happened in Uncharted 2 and those kinds of things happened organically,” Russell explained. For the second game, only one set piece was devised before development properly started: the train sequence leading up to the iconic wreck dangling over a snowy Tibetan cliff.
“At the beginning, we were like, ‘hey, let’s do a train level’. But every other video game at the train is static and the world scrolls around it to fake it, but that means the game is always going straight,” Benson said. “And so we said, ‘well, why don’t we?’ Let’s make a train that actually moves through the environment.”
The creation of this tech was integral to Uncharted 2 as Nathan Drake needed to be able to hold onto moving objects for sequences where he climbs across the body of the train. In the original game, every climbable object had to be static, but pretty much every puzzle sequence in Uncharted 2 has something moving—such as the dagger of a large statue or a massive winding gear—because the train set piece required that tech.
As every response to Uncharted 2 praised its inventive and cinematic set pieces, though, Naughty Dog felt the need to go even harder for Uncharted 3. Russell recalled” “They [UC2’s set pieces] came organically. Then we started Uncharted 3. We’re like, ‘Oh my God, we got to have set pieces’.”
“We had a meeting and we and it was a brainstorm meeting and everyone’s getting set piece ideas. And we put 10 or 12 on the board or something like that. The cargo plane came from that, the Jeep sequence on the cargo plane, I think going through the desert on the horse. And the other stuff that I’m forgetting from the game.”
One of the set pieces dreamt up in this brainstorm is the genesis for one of the most inventive sections in Uncharted 3, but one of the most narratively confusing. Around two thirds in, Nathan Drake is trapped on a cruise ship ruled by pirates which ends up flooding and capsizing in a section that makes little sense for its story.
“The engineers loved us,” Russell joked. “They’re like, ‘wait, you want to see anove the water and below the water at the same time?’ That was a no-no back then, it’s still kind of a no-no today, although it’s easier to handle.”
Russell explained that they expected to have “a second meeting to pair this down into our top 4”, but that never happened. Instead, they set out to try and make every set piece a reality with some falling to the wayside just due to time or tech restraints, and it makes for a somewhat weird conclusion to the trilogy.
“The answer was like,’Nah, we’ll just try. We’ll just assume we’re going to do all of them and then we’ll cut as we need.’ And I was like, ‘you know, that’s not going to happen, right?’ And so, yeah, like almost every one of those freaking things got made into the game.”
The designer explained that the push for more set pieces instead of stronger ones meant that the game ended up feeling uneven. “It also kind of corners [writer] Amy [Hennig] a bit, right? Because it’s like, ‘oh, these are the set pieces we want to do’ She’s like, ‘well, now I have to find a way to shoehorn the ship in. So I guess we’ll have pirates and they’ll have a pirate leader.”
In Russell’s mind, this set piece focus bogged down the story of Uncharted 3 and painted Hennig into a corner. “I think that was a big flaw, trying to design that way,” Russell said. “I mean, hindsight is 20-20. We were doing what we thought was right at the time, especially coming off the success of Uncharted 2. We’re like, we’ve got to top ourselves. So more set pieces.”
The designer notes that, at the time, set pieces were all the rage, especially as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had taken the world by storm. Every game had set pieces, every game wanted set pieces, and Uncharted 2 was known for having the best set pieces. Therefore, Uncharted 3 had more than any other Naughty Dog game.
Following Uncharted 3, Naughty Dog did learn its lesson for the fourth game with less but more memorable set pieces. Although, as Russell notes, the length of that game does suffer from bit of an editing problem.
Today, the Uncharted series is on hiatus. While there are rumblings of a remake, Russell hopes one doesn’t come, and instead Naughty Dog finds a way to create new stories with Nathan Drake at some point in the future.
