What is your favorite scene from Uncharted 3 and why?Įvan: I have so many! It's hard to choose. It's such a surreal feeling now seeing that Uncharted 3 Cargo Plane scene inspiring the one in the upcoming Uncharted movie, and I'm so excited to see their take on it! I'll always remember my time on that set-piece and the people I worked on it with so fondly. We even had a fully playable zero-g sequence inside the plane that we cut at the last second! There were just a ton of new innovations and fun problems to solve every step of the way and I will always love that feeling of creatively solving them. We had to implement some old-school perfectly seamed-up infinitely scrolling backgrounds to make the desert able to move infinitely below the plane (while the plane actually stood still. Jeremy was doing wire-work on the mocap stage to capture climbing on a cargo net blowing in the wind. I was making little models of trucks on my desk to figure out how the player could climb on these things as they're hanging out of the back of the plane. Our tech and excitement were really firing on all cylinders, but it still took the bulk of the two-year production time to really make that sequence into a reality. I think coming off the high of the success of Uncharted 2, we all thought the sky was the limit, and we could achieve whatever wild-ass blockbuster idea we could think up to one-up ourselves.
It started with an off-the-cuff idea of, "What if you could chase down a plane on the tarmac and board it," which turned into, "Ok, what if the plane crashed while you were in it?", and then figuring out how that could even work and be playable. It was truly a collaborative effort with animators, programmers, sound designers, and anyone else who cared to contribute. It was the first time in my career getting to really bring together something like that. Kurt Margenau, Game Director: Definitely building the Cargo Plane sequence. We ended up putting the fix in and shipping Uncharted 3 with this critical bug fix just 2 days later. After an hour, the one tester that was running the "broken" version of the game started seeing glitching, the other one did not. We all stood there watching them play, and lo and behold, the numbers started confirming the hypothesis. We had two of our QA staff play through the two versions of the game side-by-side. If our hunch was right, we would be able to see that from the numbers printing on screen for the two versions. The second version was the "fixed" version, and it also had debug text printing on the screen. One was the current "broken" version of the game but with some debug text printing on the screen. They agreed that we should make the fix, but we needed to know if it really did fix the issue. I sat down with the senior programmers and discussed the issue and my proposed solution. I had, however, come up with a hypothesis about what was going on with the game. I freaked out, and the next morning, I walked into Evan's office saying, "We can't ship the game like this." Playing the game for a few hours on older PS3s would in almost all cases result in a broken game experience. The glitches got worse and worse until enemies would be invisible, the ocean became blood red, and levels would be outright missing. After a few hours of playing, the game started having glitches. I myself brought the game home and started playing the game from the beginning. We had sent most of the team home to play the game as we were only a few days away from submitting the final build to Sony for manufacturing. So many new features were added, we greatly improved our map designs, and did some very early live updates with limited time modes and even experimental maps that we rotated through called "The Lab."Ĭhristian Gyrling, Vice President: The game was almost done. It was a very small, scrappy team that was building on our first MP outing that we had in Uncharted 2.
What's your favorite memory of your time working on Uncharted 3?Įvan Wells, President: I really enjoyed working on the multiplayer side of things.