Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, its a go! Options

[hunter]

Cannot wait for this one, one of my top3 games on the PS3

Watch the trailer:
click

Richard Diamant, Naughty Dog's Lead Character Artist, told Gamezine; "Yes, the trailer was all rendered real-time in our engine."

[fx]

And me - one of the few ps3 games I've played more than once, and now in an icy setting - the visuals were epic the first one this has real potential

[docmoo]

have to get this game. the first one is probably one of my top 5 of all time

[fx]

"According to Game Informer the story revolves around the voyages of Marco Polo. If you've studied history Marco Polo was famous for his 24 year (that's right, he spent nearly a quarter of a century traveling) to China. Or as it was called back then Cathay. And the artifact he finds in the mountains looks Asian. I'm thinking it's going to take place somewhere in interior China".

No release date

[hunter]

Trailer from the spike tv game awards

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/22998

Excited yet?

[fx]

I officially can't keep waiting that's a pretty solid injury.

[hunter]

a couple screens to entice you even more

[fx]

The graphics look insane! But what happened to the arctic?

[toasted]

He's a hottie.

[fx]

Ye I know and his clothing gets wet when he gets in water. We are basically twins. (my clothing also gets wet)

[toasted]

Well he makes my something else get wet.

[hunter]

The graphics look insane! But what happened to the arctic?

If I read correctly hes in like Peru, so thats some town and he then ends up in the mountains

Man I am soooo amped for this game

Well he makes my something else get wet.

Pics or it aint true

[hunter]

Comparing Drakes fortune with Among thieves

[RustPuppet]

HD trailer

Schwing.

[fx]

This is going to be RIDICULOUS. Except I hate when they start the hype too soon; like its only coming out in ages...

[hunter]

http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/unchar...ered?page=0%2C0

It’s one of the great contradictions of the brutally progressive world of videogames that playing it safe is never really playing it safe.


Now, more than ever, a game without an obvious gimmick is a hard sell, and while Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune had an embarrassment of virtues, with vivid animation, a pleasantly hammy matinee story and a charming protagonist who hadn’t been over-designed to the point of shrill caricature, some found it too easy to dismiss the game as a cocktail of influences with little to truly call its own.

Despite the daredevil onscreen action, the game’s design was often carefully unadventurous, as treasure hunter Nathan Drake boldly leapt chasms, fought off zombie Nazis and scaled cliffs, the development team picked their way more cautiously through the thirdperson action game landscape, raiding only the most tried and tested of ideas along the way: the cover system from Gears Of War, and Tomb Raider’s graceful moveset.

The result was a game that sometimes struggled to find its own rhythm – it handled both platforming and shooting with confidence, but struggled to blend them, preferring instead to break its core mechanics into discrete chunks. Uncharted, therefore, leaves Naughty Dog with a particularly tricky challenge.

Some sequels have the obvious job of fixing the gaping flaws of the original. Instead, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves has to take some largely successful elements and turn them into something coherent and truly individual; it has to transcend mere excellence of execution and create a convincing identity to call its own. So far, things are looking extremely promising.

“Our last story was about Francis Drake,” says creative director Amy Hennig, sitting in the meeting room of Naughty Dog’s Santa Monica offices, while Trumpet, co-president Christophe Balestra’s dog, wanders around under the conference table, chewing at wires and brushing up against journalists’ ankles. “Our ‘what if’ was: what if Francis Drake hadn’t died when everyone thought he had? This time we’re going with Marco Polo. Our catalyst is this man who catalogued all of his journeys – all the details of everything that happened in his life – but despite that he left one gaping hole.”



The hole in question is 1292, when Polo left the court of Kublai Khan to return home to Venice, taking a fleet of 14 treasure ships and more than 600 men with him. By the time he finally reached Europe, he was down to one ship, and roughly a dozen survivors. “He never once said anything about what happened to him,” says Hennig. “And on his death bed, after people had called him a liar for what he had spoken about in his book, he said: ‘I didn’t say even half of what I saw’.”

But the search for Polo’s lost fleet is the starting point, rather than the climax, of Among Thieves, and events swiftly grow reassuringly complex. Polo’s real secret – and Drake’s eventual target – turns out to be Shambhala, the legendary Tibetan city also known as Shangri-La, and fabled home of the Cintamani Stone, a ruby which was reputed to have the power to grant wishes. It’s a story that allows for a much wider range of settings on this outing, far beyond the jungles of the first game.

The teaser trailer for Among Thieves shows a wounded, bedraggled Drake fighting his way through a snowstorm to uncover a mysterious object. Treasure hunting may still be at the fore of the action, but the shift in locations – the lush jungles of the original replaced with the bleak icefields of South-East Asia and the urban reality of a war-torn Nepal – suggests the holiday brochure appeal of the first game may be in danger of disappearing.

Add to that the promise – or threat – of a new stealth mechanic, and you could be forgiven for wondering if, in an effort to distance itself from the house of Croft, Uncharted has somewhat lost its sense of direction.

But the developers seem quietly confident of the choices they’ve made. “We wanted a wide range of environments this time,” explains Balestra after rolling the trailer. “We wanted to show this wasn’t just a jungle game.” And, from what we’ve seen, the team has succeeded in this aim: alongside ice caverns and frozen mountainsides, we’re shown a real variety of environments, from lush indoor spaces filled with gold leaf and bright colours, to an opulent train with blood red curtains and swinging brass lights, and a desolate Nepalese monastery clinging to the side of a cliff.

A passing glimpse at somebody’s workstation suggests the team may even have found room to include another jungle or two along the way.“I’ve never done so much research for any project as I have for this,” says Rhob Ruppel, Among Thieves’ art director. “We didn’t want any sense of a retread with this game, and we really wanted every bit of detail to make the world believable. Anyone can pile on details, but we also want to use them to create a mood. What would Ridley Scott do to a location like a temple? He’d layer on the right elements: tattered cloths and ropes and things that move in the wind. Our locations come alive. They breathe and have a backstory.”


Yet the main focus in Among Thieves lies not with the globe-trotting, but rather in a closer examination of the hero. “We want to go deeper into Drake and see what makes him tick, and go beneath the surface in a way we didn’t have the chance to last time,” says Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells. “In the last game we met Drake under special circumstances,” suggests Hennig.

“Almost immediately he was called to rise above his normal nature and be a hero. But we hinted there were shadier sides to him. In this game we want to explore that. He’s back in his natural element this time around, a rough and lawless world. What’s a treasure hunter’s place in the modern world? We want the player to see the contradictions. He’s affable and charming, but he can also be a jerk. I don’t want to imply we’re getting heavy and angsty – it’s still a classic adventure – but we really want to show a character with more colours to him. That’s where the subtitle comes from – his world is a world of thieves.”

The emphasis on added character depth is encouraging, but once again it’s the immediacy and effortless charisma of the animation that makes Drake so interesting to watch. The first Uncharted offered some brilliantly convincing moments – panicked dashes from a nearby grenade, or frantic lunges for a ledge – but recent changes to Naughty Dog’s Uncharted Engine 2.0 allow for a layering of far more detailed animation, and the result is a hero who gives off a palpable air of forever operating on the outer limits of his skills. He gasps as he pulls himself up over ridges, pants with exertion while scrambling out of the way of gunfire, and is constantly muttering under his breath after near-misses;

Drake’s always been a lead with appealingly limited powers, but the technology behind Among Thieves brings his regular struggles and good-natured desperation to life far more vividly than the first game could. “Uncharted used 30 per cent of the PS3’s SPUs, and this time we’re maxing it out,” says Balestra. “That means we can blend and switch animations a lot quicker, and we have more facial joints in-game for characters to react with believable expressions.”

“So if he’s sneaking, his animation has to reflect that, and if he’s on shaky ground, you’ll see him checking his balance. If he’s scared, you’ll see the anguish and fear on his face,” adds Wells. The aim is to create what game director Bruce Straley describes as “a true playable cinematic experience. True interactive storytelling, essentially.” Now that’s a claim that’s loaded with meaning.

“It’s a phrase with a stigma to it,” admits Hennig. “People think it implies passivity, but we’re trying to reclaim it. We took all our cues from what I call comfort movies – those action adventure films we all grew up watching. That’s where we took all our pacing ideas from, and it seems perfectly respectable to say that’s what we’re doing: an interactive version of that experience we like so much, and that nobody else is doing.”

“It’s boiling down those elements that will work well in the game,” suggests Straley. “Every game has the challenge of trying to make an interactive experience, so there’s certain things that lend themselves to cinematic action and things that don’t. It’s choosing your battles. It’s a lot to do with pacing – ebb and flow – it’s not all go-go-go, it’s going to have character points, and sad moments to go with the action. If something’s happening, it’s you reacting to it. For example, we have the technology to allow an entire building to collapse while you’re in it – and we can throw enemies in at the same time while that’s happening. You’re playing everything this time, not just the easy bits.”


Character work and cinematic plotting may turn out to be the game’s stars, but what leaves the biggest impression after seeing a short developer-controlled playthrough is something else entirely: the blending of movement and combat mechanics. Occurring about a quarter of the way through the finished game, the level we see throws Drake into the middle of a bombed-out Nepalese city, a maze of streets and crumbling temples being violently torn apart by Among Thieves’ new antagonist, a ruthless paramilitary leader.

Like the game’s hero, he’s set on finding the Cintamani stone, but while Drake has attempted to sneak into town as a member of the press, and eventually had to resort to ramming his car through a guard outpost, the villain has brought his entire army along with him.

While there’s smoke in the air and rubble in the streets, war-torn Nepal is reassuringly different from most videogame urban battlefields: it’s kinetic and violent, but it’s also exotic and colourful. All of the textures in Among Thieves are drawn by hand, and the result is a city that looks coherent and artful rather than drab and photocopied. Little details are everywhere – from the flags and laundry strung between buildings, to the battered tuc tuc lying in a sad heap, or the flames blazing from distant towers.

The level itself is a fight through the alleyways and over the rooftops to meet up with Drake’s new love interest, Chloe, with a handful of encounters and a few scripted interruptions along the way, ranging from collapsing floors, through a driverless (and burning) busload of militia careening down the streets, to a final confrontation with a battered troop carrier blocking a crossroads.

While the first Uncharted would have lobbed a handful of enemies at Drake to be cleared out before putting him up against a bit of lonely clambering, Among Thieves’ real breakthrough is that it can now combine both seamlessly, allowing Drake to climb up behind an enemy stationed on top of a wall and yank him into the street below, or take out distant soldiers while lurching between buildings, using shop signs not only as handholds, but as useful pieces of cover.

Because of this newfound flexibility, the playthrough turns out to be a heady mix of endearingly graceless parkour and multi-level fighting. The platforming is far more organic than in the first game, broken walls slyly suggesting handholds without the need for glaringly obvious ledges, while the maze of partially destroyed houses and piles of rubble make for an excellent strategic battleground, with gunfights breaking out on the fly. The cover system has ditched its suspiciously useful configurations of boulders in favour of more believable scenery: an upside-down jeep, a derelict gas cooker or a slightly incongruous small city car, wheel-deep in old newspapers. Drake can make his own cover, too, flipping over a table or picking up an abandoned car door.


And the stealth turns out to be far from the stop-start mood-killer you might be expecting. “Stealth is often meticulous, frustrating and boring,” says Straley. “Ours comes back to the cinematic experience – it’s about keeping the pace. On a gameplay level, you want to play one set-piece in a variety of different ways, so stealth just gives you something more in the toolbox – another element, another choice that’s available to you. Suddenly you can try out all different kinds of options. We call it action stealth. It’s not Splinter Cell. It’s choosing when and from where to enter combat.”

“You don’t see films where it’s all shooting,” chimes in Hennig. “You see heroes creep up and slam someone into a wall. In the first game, you occasionally felt there was only one way to do things. In other games, stealth is always defensive – someone spots you sneaking past them, and it’s all over. We wanted to put you on the offensive for once: stealth or shooting – both choices are valid at any time.”

All of this is aided by some excellent environmental details – bookcases shake and dislodge dusty volumes as Drake scrambles over them, while pigeons scatter in sudden bursts as he scampers from one shop sign to another, and lampposts threaten to buckle under his weight as he swings past. And the enemy AI has made some leaps too – a second playthrough by the developer reveals that if one of the militia gets to the car-door shield before Drake does, the final fight can turn out very differently, and we’re also promised that enemies will be able to scale walls and vault from one rooftop to another just as easily as he can.

Ultimately, it’s this blending of platforming and shooting, in a way no other game has yet managed convincingly, which makes Among Thieves feel like such an exciting prospect, and may help to provide the sense of individuality the first game gently lacked. Tomb Raider stumbled over the combat, Gears never attempted any kind of gymnastics, and even the first Uncharted struggled to get the combination to work. But from what we’ve seen, its sequel promises to be one of the first true action-platformers, a game that, if anything, resembles a more light-hearted, joyous and nimble take on the first few acts of MGS4 than any of the usual reference points.

It’s a time-honoured convention of treasure movies that the hero never finds quite the treasure they were looking for, and in this respect, Among Thieves may prove solidly traditional. No doubt Marco Polo’s lost fleet and the Cintamani stone will elude our hero in the final act, carried away by plot twists, sudden betrayals and selfless last-minute sacrifices. But in its place, there’s every chance that, this time, Nathan Drake may unearth the trophy he needs the most: a confident identity of his own to match the intelligence and wit with which Naughty Dog’s games are constructed.

amped ++

[cliddell66]

This game looks so good, I can't wait! It's only a couple more weeks. the demo is great. I'm looking forward to the MP mode in this one and the cinema mode too. I actually just got a ticket to a sneak preview they're doing next week where I live. Guess they're doing it around the country. who else has heard about this?

Uncharted 2 to be played on the silver screen

I think this is totally worth going to especially if you're as engrossed in the cinema mode as I am. I'm hoping to get a chance at playing the game there too since it seems like all attendees will get a chance. the waiting is almost up!

[docmoo]

Already finished it! Pretty epic game

[Fishfly]

really moo? send your copy to me pwes