Old Dog, New Tricks

That's an excellent question. There are really two questions there.

(laughs) I think there absolutely are more places we can go with the PlayStation 3, even though Naughty Dog famously said we were starting to take full advantage of the capabilities of the machine with Uncharted 2. Certainly, what we're doing with Uncharted 3 shows that there's plenty yet to coax out of the machine. In terms of the volumetric lighting, the way that light now spatially fills an area so a moving body - say, a character - passes in front of it the God rays that are cast around the character look like something we haven't seen before, even on current gen systems.

There's lots of technology that we've innovated with just for this game, like our dynamic water simulation for the sea - just as a for instance, one of the dozens of things that we've done. I think that because of the way that the cell processor works and the unique architecture of the PlayStation 3 - just as with the PS2, and the very late generation games on that console.

Shadow Of The Colossus. The way that Sony puts these machines together means that inventive and innovative engineers can keep on finding ways to divide up the system resources and get a new culmination of effects on screen - post-processing effects and that kind of thing.

But, to the second part of your question, as a game designer that's the bit that really interests me, because I would say that innovation is really more to do with design technique. The real success of Uncharted 2 comes from the way the components come together. The visual components, the quality of the game engine, the fidelity of the graphics, and the brilliance sound design; where the rubber really hits the road is where that comes together with the quality of the storytelling, and the way that the performances are delivered, the way that we embody the performances in the game, and the way the storytelling is integrated into the gameplay.

Yeah, it's not so much the dynamic physics, but the precise implementation of that, even down to the second, the schedule by which the events unfold. Speaking as an implementing game designer, as someone who works in the tools alongside the brilliant game designers at Naughty Dog, who put this stuff together with their bare hands, that's really what it comes down to.

If anything, that's the hardest part: the moment-to-moment implementation, finessing the script so that Drake jumps at just the right second to make it from one preposterous situation to the next. Making it so that even a simple event like a wall collapsing, making it so that it sells. Movie people talk about whether something "sells," whether the action on-screen is readable to an audience, especially when it's fast moving - we have all of the same considerations in interactive.

I think there's a leapfrogging effect that happens. Like most people, I like the tools at Naughty Dog to be barebones: we work from the prompt a lot; we work with simple little tools that we put together on the fly to do something we came up with that week. Those are good because you can change them, and you can make new discoveries about the kinds of things you want to do with them.

So there's very much this back and forth: let's say we want Nathan Drake to have a fistfight on the cargo deck of a huge cargo plane as it zooms across the desert; until you start trying to build that thing you don't really know what tools you need, so it's good to have that leapfrogging of ideas and technology, that leads to new ideas, that leads to new technology. I think that's how we make progress.