[PS3] Uncharted 2

[assurdum]

I really like UC2's campaign as its alot of fun and the co-op is a blast as well...UC2's mp experience lacks the certain magic that games like Halo and COD have in terms of fun factor, map design, etc...

Simple: because it is a game based only to sp, where halo & mw 2 sp is almost irrilevant; indeed I'm really surprise how good is the multi in unchy 2, I'm not expected so much and I was a lot skeptical when has been announced. Now I have almost abandoned killzone 2 multi for this.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I enjoy U2's multiplayer the most of any competitive multiplayer I've played online. It's simple, doesn't get confusing, and has lots of variety in game modes and scenery traversal allowing for unexpected routes. The lobby now works as a lobby should, with parties as they should keeping friends together, and voice chat is clear. Lag may be an issue accounting for some rather dodgy 'it looks like I've shot him several times in the head but he's still running' moments, but lag is a problem with online gaming full-stop.

Big complaints with the boosters team-selection though. U2 is noob unfriendly, often grouping the higher experienced players on one team and leaving noobs as cannon-fodder on the other. And the better you do, the more perks you get to do better. I fail to comprehend the thinking processes of game developers! Better players should be handicapped, not given advantages! Or if you don't want to stop pandering to their superiority complex, provide tiered levels. You don't put amateur boxers in the ring with heavy wieght pros. You don't put beginner tennis players up against Open champions. Don't put beginner gamers up against seasoned veterans!

 

[semitope]

Making a proper editor should allow for trees and other jungle stuff that looks random but in fact has set distances between branches etc to allow for climbing.

Turning UC into an open world game, however, would require a complete overhaul of many of the game design principles. More intelligent enemies, more freedom in the equipment and ammo management, less cinematic events...

I don't think the enemies have to be smarter, well by the standards of todays Open world enemy AI i dont think so. It would be better if they indeed were smarter. There is room to argue what intelligent AI actually is though.

This question of an open world Uncharted is unnecessary and I think it only comes about because the game is a TPS. Has anyone ever wondered when they will make an open world CoD game? Or open world Unreal game? The question also doesnt come about when talking about Gears of war does it? Or even god of war, but for some reason the idea of U3 being open world just seems compelling

 

[ShadowRunner]

I would guess the complaints of invisible walls in uncharted, rather than the others you mentioned, is because this particular game continualy gives you view of wide open environments and then goes on to only let you explore part of what you have just seen. Of course other games do do this but probably not as much as Uncharted. Also with the platforming elements the restriction is more apparent, in a game like gears you never even bother to try jump something above the waist!

 

[obonicus]

Assassins Creed, more than 2 years ago, showed that it's possible to make a game where everything that looks climbable is, that which doesn't, isn't, a jumpable distance is always a jumpable distance and a drop will do the same amount of damage, irrespective of what you are dropping from but that it also relative to the height of the drop.

This isn't really true, at least not for AC2. I noticed more 'seams' in the game than I remember from the first one. More objects that look climbable but aren't really (still not a lot, of course), a lot more of UC's 'highly-contrasted handhold' and quite a few places where leaps connect in funny ways. I think Infamous was a much better example of this sort of gameplay (except, of course, for the wire fences), though naturally it can't compete graphically.

 

[obonicus]

Turning UC into an open world game, however, would require a complete overhaul of many of the game design principles. More intelligent enemies, more freedom in the equipment and ammo management, less cinematic events...

I don't think any of these are necessary. GTA games are heavy with cinematic events, they just push them to the point of parody (particular GTA:SA). Crackdown had about the same degree of freedom equipment-wise and it was more than enough. As for intelligent enemies... well, it'd be nice but most of the games in the genre overwhelm you with numbers anyway (though until recently they'd also overwhelm you with terrible controls).

But it is not impossible to build a linear story in an open world, as AC2 has clearly demonstrated...

3D GTA games have always had a linear story. It's how the mission-structure works. It's not new or unique to AC2. The quality of the story (which is AC2's strength) is practically orthogonal to the type of world you're playing in. I don't think UC is going open world at all, for the record -- just that the challenge would be much more heavily tech-side than gameplay side.

Oh and they've managed to include linear gameplay sequences too.

This is sort of new to this generation; a few more big-profile open world games have mission design that don't allow for emergent solutions. GTA4's the biggest culprit, probably.

 

[obonicus]

The controls could also do with refining, although I'm not quite sure how changes would be implemented. Most of the times I died, it was either because I was being silly and running+gunning, or because I wanted to do something sensible but the controls did something silly.

This I have to agree with. I won't say that controls caused 'most' of my deaths, but the most frustrating. I'm not sure how to handle it, though -- separate 'drop' and 'roll' from 'take cover'? Better detection of cover?

 

[Gradthrawn]

I apologize if this is a repost, but I thought it was an excellent interview with Evan Wells. A bit of a debriefing after Uncharted 2. It provides some nice insight into their project flow and process.

A few highlights I found interesting:

G4: Can an environmental puzzle be too "gamey?" The ice caves, for example...those people really wouldn't have designed it to be so difficult to navigate, so it really sticks out that you're playing a game. Is there a disconnect there you have to be aware of?

EW: Sure, we've talked about this before...there's the concept of the "uncanny valley" in animation and modeling for human characters. And we focused a lot on avoiding that, but I think there's a new "uncanny valley" in gameplay, even, as we're making our stories and our characters, narrative and environments so believable and authentic. So when you do all of the sudden have these video game notions thrown in there, it can stand out more than it would in a game that wasn't delivering so high on the believability scale in the other areas. And yeah, we definitely...certainly the ice cave can fall into that category, and even just the body count that Drake goes through.

G4: How hard is it to design an ending for a game?

EW: Extremely hard, and something that we game after game strive to do better. Particularly the boss fights. In our game, actually, we're trying to move out of the concept of the traditional video game boss fight. Again, we try not to follow all the conventions and all the things we were just talking about with the "uncanny valley" nature of that, so we have these heightened experiences, these peak excitement moments where you fight a tank or a helicopter -- you can consider those the boss fights of Uncharted. But in the end, you really want to pay off with a face-to-face shootout with your antagonist, and those are the hardest encounters for us to design, because it's hard not to fall into the trap of just creating a bullet sponge and again breaking that sense of believability. So that is tricky, and we use the supernatural element of the storyline to explain why Lazarevic was taking so many bullets, but it's definitely something we have to be careful of. And the other side, not only trying to conquer the believability aspect of it, the other side of it we struggle with, it's something we design late in the game. It's one of the last things we put into the game and we're usually really crunched for time. Certainly I think it was noticeable in the first Uncharted that the final boss was a little bit lackluster, and I think we did a lot better with the sequel, and we'll definitely try to raise the bar for ourselves.

G4: So during the process, even if it's a small change to the story, can that throw off the whole plan?

EW: That's kind of why we don't write it ahead of time, because we don't want to fall into that trap. If we have the entire script written and as we're making the game we realize "Oh wow, this level's not fun," or "This level's too long, we have to shorten it." But now there are all these plot points that are in there, and we can't remove them without completely having ripple effects all the way down the line. So that's why we only are writing the scenes as far in advance as we need to.

 

[patsu]

G4 interviews Evan Wells:
http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/7...ls-Reflects-on-Uncharted-2-Among-Thieves.html

Pretty informative. Talks about linearity, bullet sponge, uncanny valley, future improvement, Cell/SPU utilitization and other behind-the-scene thoughts. Also wonder about their quest for believability in the game. Personally for U3, I am split between wanting to see something more sinister, or something more human/authentic.

 

[suryad]

G4 interviews Evan Wells:
http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/7...ls-Reflects-on-Uncharted-2-Among-Thieves.html

Pretty informative. Talks about linearity, bullet sponge, uncanny valley, future improvement, Cell/SPU utilitization and other behind-the-scene thoughts. Also wonder about their quest for believability in the game. Personally for U3, I am split between wanting to see something more sinister, or something more human/authentic.

Thanks for the link I am checking it out right now As for U3, well I am not going to be picky...all I could really hope for is for them to keep doing what they are best at!

 

[suryad]

You know, tap into that inner child that we all have of wanting to go on these adventures and sort of bring back those moments of when you first saw something like that on the movie screen, and that feeling of excitement and adventure that it pulled out of you. We wanted to create that in interactive form, and I think Adam's review mentioned that he had that same experience, and that was really flattering.

I agree so much with that quote when it comes to playing that game. Heck even my mom and dad who have zero imagination (I exaggerate of course) but seriously they think games are for losers (and that is why I never had consoles or anything growing up but thats another story) they were drawn into watching what was going on. I mean this with the most praise possible but it felt like playing a properly done Michael Bay flick like for example The Rock...with the over the top action just with Indiana Jones! I just cant describe and how much I loved playing that game!

 

[semitope]

G4: How comfortable are you now developing on the PS3? Are you starting to get an itch for new hardware?

EW: Absolutely the opposite. We're pretty comfortable with the PS3, and we made a very big advancement between the first game and the second game, we're really tapping into the Cell processor, but there's more there. The first game, it was idle about 70% of the time, which we rectified for the sequel, and now it's at least busy 100% of the time, but it's still not fully-optimized code. I mean, in order to get to that 100%, it was more about making sure the pipeline was filled, and we weren't running into one of the processors becoming idle because there wasn't a job ready for it. But now we have to go into all of those routines and optimize them so we that can get even more done using that Cell processor. It really feels that sometimes it's this bottomless pit of processing power, you find the right kind of job for it and it can just churn through those things so fast, which really helps with a lot of our rendering and post-processing effects.

So yes, we're getting comfortable. No, we're not itching for new hardware. I would love to keep working on the PlayStation [3] for 5 or 6 more years...I think there's still a lot to get out of it. We're not really feeling limited by the hardware, it's more about the hours of the day and how quickly we want to get the next game out.

Even more excited about uncharted 3 now. When you look at how smoothly uncharted 2 runs it makes sense. Your code is either running at the limit of the hardware and never above (for the target framerate) or there is more left in the hardware above what you are using.

 

[patsu]

Just realized Gradthrawn posted the same link above.

I like Evan Well's comment about "uncanny valley for gameplay".

 

[Cornsnake]

I have to agree. It's real easy to fall into that bullet sponge trap.

Thing with U2 being linear, I think has more to do with the gameplay feeling linear, rather than just about having to travel from A to B. If players had more choice and freedom in gameplay along the way we'd probably see less complains about it being too linear.

His point about Uncanny Valley in gameplay is interesting. I find it really breaks immersion for me if games have a very realistic or believable game world, but then use very obvious and artificial gameplay mechanics. In Killzone 2 nothing stands out more then the few times they use infinitely respawning enemies, or that incredibly artificial fight with Radec. You can shoot Radec all you want but he doesn't seem to die. Then there are these other enemies, do they respawn infinitely, or are these just waves of enemies. And when you finally kill them all, only then can you kill Radec. Of course Uncharted has a similar problem with waves of enemies. If they limit it to a few waves it might not break the immersion.

 

[wco81]

Try connecting, but it spins for 10 minutes and said error syncing patched data first.

Finally got in and tried selecting game types and quick match for co-op and it counts down 5 secs. and then goes back left to the previous screen. That means it didn't find anyone else looking for the same types of matches?

I tried DM and All Competitive Modes too.

Supposedly over 10,000 players online but it's hard to find a game?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Something not right there. That's the sort of trouble I had in the Beta, but the current game is fairly flawless, except for partying issues.

 

[wco81]

Finally worked, I guess it was taking time finding the best pings.

Played one DM and one Co-Op. It was okay but it was battle heavy. Didn't really see the platforming aspect, which is what I like best about the game.

 

[Kittonwy]

Eurogamer GOTY

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Finally worked, I guess it was taking time finding the best pings.

Played one DM and one Co-Op. It was okay but it was battle heavy. Didn't really see the platforming aspect, which is what I like best about the game.

Depending on the map, there can be LOADS of vertical routes to traverse. It's still a shooter in MP gameplay (how could you have multiplayer jumping? ) but the movement makes it a very different beast to all the other shooters where the routes are fixed and more predictable.

 

[Billy Idol]

played some MP yesterday...fun game, but PS3 typically: no one is chating...is there a logical reason, why PS3 gamers hate talking? Is there a logical reason that when playing Live everyone talks (probably to much )

That said, the game is a lot of fun, although I have the same feeling as Shifty: the teams are often very un-even...I hope I am not guilty of being super bad, because usually I am in the team which gets brutally owned