Naughty Dog's Evan Wells talks writing, pacing of Uncharted 2

All things considered with the infamous E3 video and all the hype and expectations I think Killzone 2 is another one of the marquee games that not only delivered but exceeded what was promised. Didn't play Brutal Legend though.

@Tmac

Seems like you get dumber with each post. Brutal Legend was a 'steaming pile of shit'? Really?

Granted, it didn't do much for me and was Schaefers' weakest game so far (I think Psychonauts is ridiculously overrated as well) but that kind of vitriole is just stupid. The game had creative art direction, good voice acting, decent gameplay. It wasn't great, especially given the expectations (and misleading demo) but your comment is again, dumb.

We have true pile of shit like Darkest of Days, Bomberman Act Zero, Damnation, Haze etc. and solid but unremarkable efforts like Brutal Legend do not deserve to get lumped in with them.

You're routinely now showing ignorance on a Sprinkles level and I wouldn't mind seeing you gone from this site as well

A bad game's a bad game, doesn't matter who made it or what their pedigree is. Brutal Legend is a steaming pile of horse shit, and that's the nicest way I can put it. I was semi-excited for it too, but it was just terrible and I'm ok with admitting I made a judgement error buying it.

Killzone 2 was easily the most boring FPS I've ever played. The only gun that was even remotely fun or exciting was the lightning gun and the unlimited ammo sucked all the fun out of that one in about two minutes. What a generic, dull waste of $60. Oh, and the controls were worse and more hand-crampingly painful than any FPS on the DS.

Really? I thought Killzone 2's controls were some of the best I'd used in a long time.

But why do the guns have to be 'exciting'? They've just got to work.

Tmac - completely missed my point.

troll

Tmac - completely missed my point


troll

They don't have to be exciting, I guess, but I just didn't think they were fun.

No, I take that back. Killzone should have had exciting guns because it's set in the future on an alien planet. That's some exciting shit right there but the result was like an allegory for American involvement in Vietnam and South Korea from 1956-64. Booooorrrriiiinnnnng

I thought KZ2 was one of the best FPSs in 2009. I just changed the controls to mirror that of COD. Only a chimp would play with default controls that didn't suit their style.

RE 5 was that game for me, the demo was so good but the whole game was fucked. I called Brutal Legend out because I knew it would suck, got down voted a lot but I knew I would be right. Killzone 2 was great btw.

You know, a lot of people say that Killzone 2 was great, but nobody gives any specifics other than "the graphics". What was so great about it? The bland environments? The uninspired enemies? Maybe it was the pointless story or the shallow, one-dimensional characters. Okay, the part with the mech suit was cool, but your borderline-retarded squad mates and the grenade-spamming A.I. were frustrating pains in the ass. So anybody want to tell me what was so damn great about that game, specifically?

Look WREturns
All i expected from Killzone 2 was to be fun, and it exceeded everything i hoped for. The story was what i'd expect. The dialogue was sometimes hilarious. The online was always something different, and I could come back to it with a smile.

KZ2 may not have been very innovative, and the story may have been a tad unoriginal, but it did everything so damn well I love it. It's my personal GotY.

It's like NOVA for the iPhone. That game is a total Halo/Dead Space ripoff, yet it's spectacular nonetheless.

@WRE

The one thing I really enjoyed from the game was the AI actually. They actually seemed somewhat intelligent.

I remember on the last level they would always go after my idiot partner first. As soon as he was down they would try to flank me. It usually worked too. so there I was trying to save my partner while fending off rocket attacks and trying not to get flanked from the stairs and the other side of the balcony/walkway.

It was tough, but fun. Every time I died I felt like I was dying because I did something stupid, not because the enemies were too tough or because they spammed a particular attack.

@WREturns

Killzone 2
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ps3/killzone2

Now shut the fuck up

How does a metacritic score trump his personal feelings on the game? I liked KZ2, but I can see why some folks didn't care for it. Of course, I also liked ODST but understand why some don't like the Halo series. (Though their rabid hate for it seems inflated and without basis.)

@Duke

"You know, a lot of people say that Killzone 2 was great, but nobody gives any specifics other than "the graphics". What was so great about it?"

I think the metacritic page has more than enough links to illuminate "specifics"

tl;dr.

I'm just kidding. You've got a semi-point. But MW2 had a whole lot more reasons to hate it than Halo 3 did. Uncharted 3 probably still won't be as huge as Halo 3 or MW2 were. It's not that type of title.

Yeah, I hear you. Although ND is so talented it's hard to imagine U3 being a dissapointment.

You're so right about Halo though - they're all good. People forget that the buzz about the original was bating it on 'Legendary' difficulty and how good the AI was - and is. It also brought multiplayer fps into the console forefront.

I'm ok with the criticism of MW2 as far as the single player goes though - it was woefully short and they had two years and an existing engine to build a more solid campaign. U2 was over twice as long, with a much better story, plus their first multiplayer effort. MW2 is still good - the brief single player was fun it just seemed like a tack on the multiplayer.

People just like to bitch, complain and hate on what's popular; not realizing that games have never been better than what we're seeing right now.

Uncharted 3 will likely be the game that tips it to the precipice of commercial vassula / overhyped garbage in the eyes of most gamers. So, Uncharted 4 will be the game everyone hates.

@ Darth Bradwart

Not to be the guy who says "you're wrong", but I don't have a semi point, I have a 100% legitimate point that completely holds water. These cycles and fan reception are proof. And it's not some guaranteed every other game shit either. ODST continued the cycle that Halo 3 started, but if Halo: Reach is marketed right it'll be championed as the next coming of online gaming and be the cool, underground thing again because the mainstream forgot about Halo in a lot of ways.

As for Call of Duty? I don't think there's any hope for that series to regain that hype. When COD4 came out, a lot of the vocal community (see: us), dropped Halo and picked up Call of Duty. Personally, I felt it was the most overrated game of 2007 with a completely unbalanced multiplayer mode with maps that promoted camping and a campaign that didn't deliver enough wow throughout to justify it's length. But that's an argument for another time.

Anyway. Back to Uncharted 2. Is the game great? I sure as shit think so, but it wouldn't be GOTY in my mind if this year didn't royally suck so much. The game was great, but it's really been overhyped and overacclaimed at this point. As for Uncharted 3, it's the biggest franchise Sony has next to God of War. The game is gonna receive huge marketing and will probably get a snub from a lot of people because of it, and that's just plain fucked up.

@ OnToGloryReturns

Don't compare the lengths of U2 and MW2. U2 broke up the action with a few hours worth of puzzle solving, exploring, platforming, and reusing environments once for exploration and a second time for gunfights. The only time MW2 re-used anything was the first level you play in DC, but everything else was ridiculously fast paced and ran though content that needed significant development time.

The quality I wont argue with though. All and all, I felt Uncharted 2 had a more quality campaign. The story was better, the character development was better, the narrative was better, the cutscenes were awesome, the levels were more inspired, and I felt it was just more fun. However Uncharted 2 was extremely predictable. MW2 fucked with my head in ways that no game has done before. Every time I expected something, they flipped the switch on me, and when your running through the game in such an action packed way, there's something to be said for that. I still feel MW2 had a very good campaign that has been extremely underrated.

As for multiplayer, U2 doesn't even remotely compared to MW2, and quite honestly neither does the co-op. It's easy to see that both took very little in the way of resources and development time compared to something like COD, Halo or Battlefield. Was it a nice effort? Sure. Is it playable? Definitely. But don't be so quick to give them loads of credit for what is quite simply an average multiplayer mode that I could easily live with or without.

I disagree with that because I honestly feel that the multiplayer and co-op in UC2 was awesome. MW2 was full of plot holes and replaced story telling with shock and awe. The story went so downhill compared to the first MW that if I didn't know better I'd think another developer entirely made the game. The story was pure non-sense and was basically a cliche of every war movie of the last 10 years. When the game ended I honestly wanted to bitch slap FourZeroTwo and everyone else at IW for doing me dirty like that. It felt like the middle of the game ... then it ended as abruptly as it began. They obviously spend 90% of the development cycle on the multiplayer which is an indictment its self considering all the bugs and glitches.

@ Johnny - exactly. The MW2 campaign had a terrible story and for a two year dev cycle its' quality and length were pretty underwhelming. Clearly the multiplayer is their focus now.

U2 multiplayer has recieved many accolades, in many ways if formed a new 'platformer/shooter' genre. I wouldn't call it 'average' but that is just me.

In any case it's easily goty in my opinion, with B:AA right behind it. Never understood all the Borderlands accolades - briefly entertaining but as repetitive and one dimensional as they come (love the art style and humor tho). I think it became so popular because many fps players who would never touch an rpg experienced the fun of that genre in a very streamlined way - gameplay wise it was an arcade version of Fallout 3.

@ johnnynumber5

You can *like* the multiplayer and co-op in U2 all you want, but that doesn't change what it is. I'm talking about features and what it did to evolve multiplayer and cooperative gaming. Its features were run of the mill, and it did nothing to change online gaming. Modern Warfare 2 did. Point is it's pretty easy to tell more time was spent on MW2s campaign then was spent on U2s multiplayer and co-op combined. All they had to do was take a trip over to Insomniac or Guerrilla Games to get some groundwork and base code, which we know happens among first and second party studios under SCE.

As for MW2s campaign, I think you're being way, way to critical of it. You pin it as a cliche war movie, when all U2 is at a base level is a cliche treasure hunting movie in the vain of Indiana Jones. At least MW2 wasn't nearly as predictable as U2 was. I'm not saying MW2 was better, but realize what it is. It's a war movie in game form. It's about betrayal, action, explosions, and general bad-ass-ness. You really don't need to flesh out a fantastic story line, just like Uncharted 2 didn't need to be anything more then predictable because it was still fun that way.

Am I the only one who gets the impression that Kenny Goo actually hasn't played UC2? His comments are really generalized... lol.

@ Breakdown

http://i47.tinypic.com/mo7s2.jpg

Bite me.

No thanks.

And even if that is you, which is dubious, your thought that Naughty Dog walked over to Insomniac and GG to borrow their codes for the multiplayer mode just points to the probability that you've most likely not played either of the 3 games' online modes, as they are nothing alike beyond the fact that they all have guns.

But I wish you luck in getting another guy to bite you, I know some people are into that stuff.

@ Breakdown

I'm not going out of my way to prove I've played the game because you're going out of your way to be an ass hole. I played, and completed the game. You made a bullshit assumption because you wanted to look clever. Suck it up, you were wrong.

Moving on, there's a lot more code behind a multiplayer component then just the UI and the whether or not your capture a flag or trying to shoot a dude for points. The first and second party studios under SCE have talked before about how they share bits of code and run ideas by each other when they need help. That's a fact. Look it up and maybe you wouldn't come of nearly as ignorant as you are now.

If Naughty Dog wanted help with put a multiplayer mode in U2, there's a number of studios under SCE they could have gone to. Santa Monica, Sony Bend, Incognito, Zipper, Guerrilla, Insomniac, and Slant Six would all have been potential studios. If the needed help with netcode, game chat, lobby systems, etc, they had quite a few people you could have, and probably did help them.

And again, with the trying too hard to be clever bullshit, really, stop. You're not impressing anybody. You're just making a complete ass of yourself.

Actually, it kinda looks like you're the one making an arse of himself.

I feel like that with all shooters now-a-days. Sure, UC2 has treasures but its the same way with Intel documents, playing cards and Helghast symbols. It breaks up the flow of the game and is just ... stupid. It'd be one thing if the treasures had a point beyond mere collection but they don't do anything extra except getting a platinum trophy.

You're forgetting that looking for treasures is one of the many ways of gaining cash to unlock more sweet singleplayer and multiplayer extras that really sweeten the deal.