Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series is infamous for its scale and cinematic action, but the original game is rough around the edges. Amidst the middling combat and uneven platforming, the original game’s difficulty can often be woefully inconsistent when it comes to quality.
Speaking to FRVR for the next episode of our FRVR Podcast, Uncharted and The Last of Us designer Benson Russell explained that the original game hasn’t held up all that well. While the developer doesn’t want to see a remake of the first game, they also accept that it isn’t the most polished game in Naughty Dog’s repitoire.
“Uncharted 1 went through a whole lot of hell during development,” he explained. “They made a decision when going to PlayStation 3 that they were going to ditch all the old tech and rewrite all new stuff from scratch. Well, that caused a lot of problems because systems came online way later than they should be. So you have this issue of, like, they were still doing paper design… and artists were just making cool art because there was no gameplay.”
While Uncharted’s sequels would have environments designed for the story, Drake’s Fortune saw numerous instances where levels were constructed within already created environments. “We didn’t have a place for actual combat encounters but all this geo was made and we couldn’t go back and retrofit and make all new geo, so we had to find ways,” he said.
Within the hell of turning tech demo environments into playable levels, the designers at Naughty Dog discovered that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was also woefully short for a full-priced AAA PlayStation exclusive. “When we were done, it’s like, this is a five hour game,” Russell recalled. “We can’t charge 60 bucks for a five-hour game with no multiplayer! People are going to be p**sed off!”
This led to the creation of the game’s dynamic difficulty scaling. While players pick a difficulty setting at the start of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, the game shifts difficulty depending on how well you’re doing. This is the same across the entirety of the original trilogy, but particularly egregious in the first game, and it only exists to artificially lengthen the experience.
“We ended up putting a dynamic difficulty system in, but it’s key thing was to slow the player down if they were too good. That’s one of the big ones. That’s one of reasons why Uncharted 1 gets so hard. If you’re doing really good for the difficulty level you have it set on—it’s all time based! We would do a bunch of focus tests and we would grab the average times per encounter… if you beat a combat encounter faster than the average that we had, we would start cranking the difficulty.”
Russell explained that it was originally designed “to find a good balance”, but as playtesters sped through the game, it was used to extend the adventure. “In the end, it was more geared toward just slowing you down from rushing through the game.”
Of course, the system remained throughout all of Naughty Dog’s PlayStation 3 titles as the studio continued to improve. “Dynamic difficulty is in all three [games], but in the second and third ones it was tuned to match [you]. It wasn’t tuned to delay the game, or slow you down, it was tuned to match your skill level,” he said.
As for the state of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune as a whole, Russell is still proud of the game. To this day, the decisions made in the original Uncharted still continue to inspire games across the industry, and is likely still influencing Naughty Dog for its in-development PS5 exclusive Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophecy.
“You can tell it’s rough around the edges,” the designer admitted. “And also a lot of people commented that it didn’t know what it wanted to be. Because it was influenced by Gears of War, 100%, but it was also this Tomb Raider style adventure game, but it didn’t really pick a lane. It felt like it wanted to be both at the same time, but neither at the same time…
“I’m proud of it! I mean, I think it’s a great achievement. For what it is and how it redefined certain things, it led to Uncharted 2 and stuff like that. I’m happy in that regard, but as a developer, I know all the s**t that went into it. It definitely is rough around the edges and I would love to go back and do some things, but hey, that’s history, right? It goes into the annals of history and people play it.”
