"When it comes to multiplayer, everyone's opinion is valid," Cogburn says. "I don't like the way this gun feels. Okay, tell me why. I love the way the gun felt. Alright, tell me why. To find that grey is such a black art, and I'm still working on it right now."
With the Uncharted 3 beta now available to the public, there must be an awfully long line forming at this particular Naughty Dog desk. Thanks to a data collection and filtering system, devised by the programmers and company co-president Christophe Balestra, Cogburn and the team can eavesdrop on every match and single out the topics they're most interested in.
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Cogburn is looking for "reasonable arguments" from the community to form within the flood of feedback, and can respond through an array of granular adjustments on his side of Uncharted 3. "Oh, man, we have so many knobs. I can adjust everything from player run speed, to the wobble of the gun when you shoot, to the zoom that occurs when you go in, to how much damage [you take] -- whether on the feet, the legs or the chest," he says. "I have all sorts of knobs that I can play with all the time."
A public beta is the beginning of a debate: the game designer who should know best, versus the players who might know better en masse. Naughty Dog is confident that necessary changes unearthed by the community will be minor, and willing to rethink larger mechanisms if the incoming data demands it. It may lack the Hollywood framing and thrills found in the single-player campaign (which now has a larger team dedicated to it than Uncharted 2 had), but the story emerging from the numbers is worth pursuing. There are arguments to be settled, for and against firing rates, reload speeds and recoil. "We'll get those numbers and do what we gotta do," Cogburn says.
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its just a split screen of the same game.
