While most people play Uncharted games for the single-player narrative, it goes without saying that the die-hard fans of the series are chomping at the bits to get their hands on Nathan Drake's upcoming adventure. The multiplayer beta for arguably the most anticipated exclusive game in the PlayStation 4's history kicked off this weekend, so we took the opportunity to catch up with Naughty Dog's Robert Cogburn, the lead game design for the game's multiplayer portion.
What do you hope to get out of the Uncharted 4 multiplayer beta?
Data, data, data, data, data, data, data! One of the reasons that the beta is so rich with the wide variety of guns, sidekicks, mysticals – a large variety of things – is the fact that we're trying to ensure that when we release it to retail, we have the most balanced multiplayer experience possible. That's really the high-level goal of this whole thing, just to dial everything in.
Most people, when they think of Uncharted, they think of the big narrative moments, the huge set pieces, and everything that's in the main storyline. What are the challenges associated with working on the multiplayer component of a game that is so well known for its storytelling and cinematic moments?
It's interesting that you bring that up because it's definitely been an ongoing process. We kind of felt with Uncharted 2, while it was a sound multiplayer experience, over time it became dry pretty quick. With Uncharted 3, while a lot of people enjoyed that multiplayer experience, again it didn't have the level of depth that you kind of come to expect – the things that give breath to these online games. We kind of felt that with The Last of Us, it dialed in to how we can create depth in the moment-to-moment. And so with those lessons, the challenge for Uncharted 3 was to create systems that offer short story moments between players. What are the things we can do to create those interesting narrative moments that will be unique from other online games?
And I think the challenge for the online experience compared to single-player is that we couldn't bring those narrative moments over obviously. But what can we introduce in the moment-to-moment to create narrative experiences specific to competitive multiplayer, but still something that the franchise was known for? And over time that was something that we just tried and tried and tried to dial in – like Uncharted 3 we had the levels where you're on the airplane running down the runway or the train level – we're constantly aware that we want to introduce something that created cool narrative moments, and I kind of feel like with Uncharted 4 and the things we've introduced like the sidekicks, the mysticals, and the rich loadout system, we're sort of honing in on that direction of what it takes to make it happen.
What was the original goal behind the new mechanics like the sidekicks?
The soul of Naughty Dog is iteration – we always prototype, prototype, prototype, prototype – and we were prototyping a wide variety of interesting gameplay-mode ideas. Through that iteration process we had these little nuggets of things that, despite some failures, were still pretty cool. At the end of the day, we sort of stumbled upon sidekicks and with that we sort of started thinking, "Okay, sidekicks are cool because genre-wise, the hero has a sidekick and typically the sidekick has some sort of special ability that the hero doesn't. What can we do to leverage that?" So we ended up coming up with a wide variety of sidekicks.
It was just sort of a thing that with the PlayStation 4 we were able to do, and as we were playing with them over time we realized it was pretty badass. Putting your sniper at the top of the horseshoe in our island map is just marking and pegging motherf---ers in that long hallway there, and it's a badass experience. Additionally, we really like the idea of being in a pinch and being outnumbered and being able to spawn someone who can help you out real quick and give you an opportunity to get away or give you an opportunity to move forward. We really dug how that was feeling for us internally, so we just sort of carried them all the way through.
Was there ever the idea of taking less of a competitive angle and approaching it with this idea of a sidekick from a cooperative perspective?
I think you'll see some stuff in the future that will really leverage these guys in an interesting way. The iteration process I was talking about earlier... we really tried some cool stuff out. Some of the ideas were like, "Holy s---, this is going to be great, but we don't have enough time to do this." I think in the future you'll see some interesting things we'll be doing with sidekicks in that regard.
As soon as I saw that it was Nathan and Sam in the main story, I always thought it would be cool for Naughty Dog to do some sort of cooperative puzzle solving. I always wanted a mode where you would team up with a friend and just solve puzzles like the ones in the story modes together.
Yeah! Wouldn't that be pretty cool? [Laughs] That would be pretty cool. I can't wait to share with you some of the iteration things that hopefully we might see in the future. But yes, we know that would be pretty f---ing cool.
On the next page, we talk more about the mysticals and get into the influences of the multiplayer modes.
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