Naughty Dog is a filthy tease. Yesterday, the folks behind the company met with a plethora of videogame journalists, went over the story and details of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and even played through a level set in a bombed out section of Nepal. Yeah, the gameplay looked awesome and the graphics were somehow better than the crisp stuff we saw in Drake's Fortune, but when all that was said and done, Naughty Dog kept talking -- about the possibility of a helicopter shooting out the foundation of a building and Nathan having to navigate his way out of the crumbling structure while the enemies around him try and do the same thing; about fighting on top of a train as it curves and careens through the environment and Nathan having to adjust his balance and shots accordingly; about picking to either run through the train cars or shimmy along the roof. The developers talked about these OMG moments, but they didn't show them.
Naughty Dog gives you a taste and leaves you hurting for more. It's criminal.
Uncharted 2 is going to drop Nathan into a quest to find Marco Polo's fortune. See, after spending about 20 years in the court of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo headed home with 14 ships, more than 600 people, and more treasure than you could shake a stick at. When Polo docked 18 months later, he had one ship and 18 passengers. The explorer, who many accused of telling ridiculous stories, would never speak of what happened during his journey. When Marco Polo was on his deathbed, his relatives begged him to recant his tales so he'd get into heaven, but Polo replied "I didn't tell half of what I saw."
Where's Sully?
Where's Sully?
Eerie story, mountains of loot, and a historical mystery? Sounds like a quest for one Nathan Drake. Set about two years after Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Among Thieves finds our hero down on his luck and running with the looters and pirates on the seedier side of life. Naughty Dog has been tightlipped about what exactly is happening in Drake's world, but we do know that Chloe Frazer is a major part of it. Described as a reckless and brash Australian explorer, Chloe and Drake have had a previous "relationship" and quickly find common ground with the Marco Polo case. Somehow, the duo finds out that Marco Polo had set out on a secret expedition to Shambhala -- also known as Shangri-La -- to find the Cintamani Stone, a massive sapphire that's the Buddhist Holy Grail and would be worth billions today. Of course, a paramilitary leader who just so happens to be a war criminal is out to find the stone as well, and his private army is going to stop Drake and Chloe however it can.
With that, the adventure is on and said to take Chloe and Nate from snowy mountain tops to cities packed with temples to murky swamps and beyond. My demo picked up with our girl and boy split up. They had known that the next clue in their journey to Shangri-La was in a temple in a Nepal, but that village was in the midst of a war. See, the bad guys knew the next clue was here as well, but rather than use their noggins to figure out which temple held the prize, they just rolled in and began ransacking the place. This got the locals in a tizzy, and the militia is now on the scene fighting the machinegun-packing masses at every turn. Chloe and Drake tried to sneak in via a Jeep and by dressing Nate as a reporter, but the bad guys saw through that pretty quickly, chased the vehicle through the city in their own armored vehicle, and fired a nasty turret whenever they got the chance. Navigating down a tight alley, Nate lost the foes but also ditched his ride. On foot and huddled behind a half wall of what used to be the interior of a building, the actual gameplay began.
Pressed up against that wall, Nate tried to eye a group of paramilitary personnel that was slowly walking a destroyed street -- there was rubble everywhere, household objects littered the street, the buildings were smashed and smoldering. Suddenly, a bus careened onto the scene in an attempt to take out some of the bad guys, but it only succeeded in crashing and blocking the road. With the bad guys distracted by the bus, Drake ran into the street, picked up some ammo with Triangle, and baseball slid into cover behind an oven that was packed in with some other junk in the street. From there, Drake popped out, grabbed a straggler, and broke his neck.
Two is the magic number.
Two is the magic number.
Giving players a choice in Uncharted 2 is something Naughty Dog drove home during its presentation, and the choice between stealth and straight-up combat is at the forefront of that philosophy. Whereas you could sneak in a few sleeper hold attacks in the original game, that line of offense usually meant you were spotted by the nearly omniscient cast of pirates. In Among Thieves, Naughty Dog is giving you the tools to get your Solid Snake on and silently take down the bad guys if you wish. If enemies haven't spotted Drake, he's going to move differently than if they had seen him. He's going to slink along walls, carefully peek over cover, and move silently. At one point, Nate leapt from one floor of a building to the ledge of the next. There was an enemy standing guard on the rooftop Drake was hanging from, but the foe had his back turned when Nate made the leap of faith, so the jerkwad didn't know our hero was there until the bad guy walked towards the ledge, Nate grabbed the guy 'round his belt, and threw the guard to the pavement below for the instant knockout and/or death.
Like I said though, being quiet is just one half of the equation. After running from the oven to silently killing the straggler, Nate whipped out his gun and started a traditional Uncharted firefight complete with cover, crosshairs, and headshots. With the bullets flying, I did notice one small but welcome change. While the HUD is pretty much the same as the first game -- a tan rectangle featuring a picture of your gun and how many bullets you have left -- there is now a column of grenade slots on the left of the image so that you can easily see how many handheld explosives you're packing.
With the small squad out of the way, Drake advanced on the beached bus, but as he got close to it, the vehicle exploded and knocked the lead on his ass. Now, although the explosion was something of a movie (i.e. you couldn't run from the blast) it there was no loading or noticeable dip when the action stopped and the scripted event took over. It was seamless.
With that point of entry to the city cut off, Nate said "When in doubt, climb." Drake moved to a telephone pole, shimmied up the wood, leapt to some bricks on a building, grabbed onto a sign, and basically took all of his jungle antics into a cityscape. Naughty Dog's emphasis on player choice is parlaying into this climb/run mechanic as well. Nate's going to have more to climb in Uncharted 2, so it's up to you how or if you want to use it. Of course, some of these grab-able spots are old and crappy, so expect air conditioners to begin to fall off walls when you hang on them and signs to collapse under your weight if you hang out too long. Another interesting angle to this newfound ability to climb just about anywhere is that you can now fight from any position you find yourself in. If Nathan's clutching onto a thing of bricks, he can shoot from it, and if he's dangling from a sign, he can shoot from it -- Naughty Dog's calling it "traversal gunplay," and it seems pretty cool.
But, as a full-blown Uncharted nerd, the things I dug the most about the Naughty Dog demo were the little touches. When Drake made a big old leap from rooftop to rooftop, he flung his arms backwards and kicked out his legs as he flew. When this is happening, it's easy to see the new animation for his kicking feet and moving hands. When he was looking down a street, it was easy to see the detail of the marketplace at the end of the road. When Nate gets into a hand-to-hand scuffle, it's easy to see that he's now a badass.
Peekaboo.
Peekaboo.
In Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, I didn't use the melee attacks all that much on my first playthrough because I didn't find them super-effective. Sure, they killed the bad guys, but they usually took some time and left Drake open to attack. In Uncharted 2, that doesn't seem to be the case. After all the ledges and jumping, Nathan fell into another group of baddies. This time, one of them came at Drake with a riot shield. Our hero shot the top of the shield so that it would lean back at just a bit of an angle, ran up the makeshift ramp, and dropped behind the bad guy before breaking his neck. Nate then picked up the shield and used it for his own transportable cover.
This mix of shooting and melee carried on as Drake made his way through the town and eventually to an alleyway. Suddenly, the original enemy vehicle sped in to block the path and take out Drake with the turret. After Nate shot it out with the few army men who popped up around the vehicle, a rocket flew in from behind Drake and took out the enemies. Chloe was on the scene and taking names.
Now, Naughty Dog kept saying that Nate and Chloe had a "relationship" and "history," but no one ever expanded on the details. After the explosion, a cutscene began where Chloe jumped from her shooting point onto Nate's frame and wrapped her legs around him.
"Is that an ancient Tibetan ritual dagger in your pocket," she says all sexy-like.
"Well, maybe I'm just happy to see you," Nate replies.
Of course, it is the dagger. The knife has a symbol on it that Nate figures will lead them to the next clue in the temple that shares the same symbol. Upon explaining this to Chloe, she responds that they should go to a hotel she knows.
"Chloe, this is not the time," with a sly smile.
Sure, she explains that she only wants to go to the hotel because it's high up and has a great view of all the temples, but it's pretty clear that at one point Nate and Chloe were getting it on and that they might be getting it on again in this game. This of course leads to the question of what the hell happened to Elena, Drake's girl from the first game. Over in my interview with Naughty Dog, you can read Naughty Dog Co-President Evan Wells and Creative Director Amy Hennig dance around what's happening with the original love interest, but the most interesting piece of this "Where is she?" puzzle came when Naughty Dog played Claudia Black's screen test for the part of Chloe. In it, Nathan and Chloe strike up a conversation right after someone leaves the room -- although Hennig was quick to point out that we shouldn't draw conclusions from this clip and that the script's gone through many changes since this was filmed.
"She broke your heart," Chloe says trying to figure out the relationship.
"Maybe I broke hers," Nathan responds.
Boom.
Boom.
From there, the conversation goes on about finding the Marco Polo treasure, but an argument soon breaks out over letting "them" come along on the expedition. Nate wants "them" to come, while Chloe wants nothing to do with "them." Could these people only referred to in pronouns be Sully and Elena? Is Chloe a happy homewrecker? Where did Nate's relationship go south? Naughty Dog isn't saying, so we're left waiting.
Luckily, there's a lot more to talk about when it comes to this sequel. Greg Edmonson, the composer of the first game, is back to provide the score; Nate's going to have a handful of different outfits that'll pertain to his different environments; and you don't have to worry about tank top-wearing pirates eating an entire clip of bullets before they die. During the presentation, Naughty Dog broke the soldier enemies into three categories -- mostly light, mostly dark, and mostly badass. The characters in the lighter uniforms are going to go down from a few shots, but the characters in full-on armor and helmets are going to take a licking. On top of all that, Wells said that Naughty Dog listened to fans and lengthened this installment of Nathan Drake's adventures.
"It will be bigger and better than the first game," Wells said.
Sounds good, but now we have to wait.
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