Interview: Bruce Straley On Bringing Uncharted To Its Conclusion

So, we can now tell you that Uncharted 4 is pretty damn good, as our review went live this morning. It’s a jet setting, blockbusting conclusion to what has become one of the biggest and most popular series on PlayStation.

But there’s the saying that all good things must come to an end, and this is Naughty Dog’s way of saying goodbye to the series that has established them as one of the very best game developers out there. So there’s are those mixed feelings, as I sat down to talk to Bruce Straley, game director for Uncharted 4.


TSA: Bringing Uncharted 4 and the series as a whole to a close has to be a bittersweet moment, echoing something that Nolan said earlier, but is it also liberating that you can now go and do anything you want to next?

Bruce Straley: Yes and no. It truly is mixed emotions, because yes, as we’re ending the Uncharted franchise, I think we’ve got to a really great resolution and I feel really satisfied with what we’ve done. It truly is a culmination of everything we were learning over the course of Uncharted and The Last of Us, and I’m proud of what we’ve put together and very proud of the team. So on that level, I feel satisfied.

Unlike other games, we’re doing something different. They usually drag on and… we could have been up to Uncharted 15, we’d have a jet pack and it’d be something crazy, because you’d have to reboot it five times over to keep it interesting. We’re not going to do that. We’re keeping true to what we started and we’re seeing Nathan Drake for who he is all the way through to the end.

So all of that is satisfying, but it’s bittersweet because over the course of making this game, we had to rethink mechanics, we had to evolve and refine what the basic pacing was and take the lessons we’d learned from a very different world in The Last of Us that’s very grounded, has a very heavy survivalist attitude to it, but it’s not Uncharted. Uncharted is very light hearted, it’s fast paced, and so we tried to retain that but still learn those lessons. We had to kind of rethink our basic structure that we’re hanging all our narrative off, and that was hard, and now that we’re done, now that we have the tech on the PS4, now that we have these mechanics that we like, we only have this one game to exploit them and there’s a part of me going, “But now we know! We know so much more! What else can we do?”

But we’re letting it go and letting it be exactly what it is and being OK with that. Because of the finality that we have in the conclusion that we come up with, I feel OK with letting it go.

TSA: You’ve always tried to explore Nathan Drake’s character and uncover new parts of who he is in each game. What is it that having his brother there lets you see in him that we haven’t seen before?

Bruce: Having Sam there, there’s a couple of things. One is that it sucks Nate back into the adventure, the adrenaline rush and the obsession that he’s wrestling with. So that lets us get this nice contrast between what’s happening in the everyday world and the life that he’s trying to create with Elena, the love, the structure and the support, contrasted with the adrenaline and the danger of the modern day treasure seeker.

But Sam also comes with this extra thing which is really beautiful, which is that Sam was there to plant the seed of adventure in Nate. There’s something about that seed that defines Nate, and having your brother gone, presumed dead, there’s something wrapped up in that for Nate and there’s something that he’s holding onto that we’re hopefully going to unravel and get to the bottom of. Sam lets us get more to what’s at the route of why Nate’s making these decisions to put his life and other people’s lives in jeopardy in the quest for this treasure, which he never ends up with. Why does he never end up with the treasure, but he continues to do it?

So there’s something interesting about that whole system that we’re exploring and that Sam allows us to do.

TSA: With all the additions to the gameplay, with the stealth, the grappling hook and so on, have you found it difficult to get people to engage with those systems? I know from previously playing a section in Madagascar, I had the grappling hook, but completely failed to use it or get one of those flying punches.

Bruce: That’s kind of a part of what we have to do when we design, to introduce and tutorialise those opportunities and give the player permission to play, to have fun and to test the boundaries.

Madagascar is [some way] into the game, so […] we have levels between what you’ll play today and Madagascar where we just build up a relationship with those mechanics and enabling the player, if we’ve done our jobs right! If we’ve done our job wrong, we also have something in this game that we’ve never had before, which is encounter select.

So an encounter is a combat space or an action space, and where we’ve always had chapter select, those are always story-based chapters and events. We have this other category, which lets you tap directly into a combat space, so after you’ve beaten a chapter it will open up those encounters to play around with. What we’re hoping will happen, and this kind of happens in development because we play these set ups over and over again, is it will give you permission to play without feeling the repercussions of the story or the pacing being damaged.

So hopefully that will add a lot of replay value, but also the knowledge that the players are going to earn by toying with the AI and the systems together.

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TSA: You’ve also got a lot more breadth to the world design and freedom to explore. Do you think that taps into the replay value? Or is it more about creating this sense of liberty for people to go in a direction of their choosing, as opposed to following this shining beacon?

Bruce: Funnily enough, we used to think about replay value a lot more, and that was our treasure system. We still have a treasure system and collectables, but it turns out that’s not so much about replay anymore, it’s for players who want to get the platinums and the trophies. We want to support that faction of our fan base, but we really think of multiplayer as being there for people who want to play continuously.

The definition of the spaces for us is about where we are narratively, so opening up the space is more about paralleling the sense of exploration. It’s not the entire game that’s going to be open, because that would affect our pacing. We have to stay true to what Uncharted is and what we know keeps us, as both players and developers, engaged is a constant flow from one thing to the next. Sometimes we want to pinch you and sometimes we want to open it up based on what we’re trying to do within the story. […]

But in Uncharted, we’ve never tried to go and make every single mechanic this cumbersome, deep, super consequential system. If we made the traversal super consequential and thought provoking…

TSA: How would you go about doing that? [laughs]

Bruce: Well, you can! We’ve actually done experiments on it, but the problem is that it greatly affects the pacing, it affects the size of the space you’re going to make and it’s a drain on the player. When we’re trying to keep a flow going, and we want one thing to cascade and domino into the next, if you make every single system too deep and too consequential, the player is constantly thinking and engaged at every single action, and that’s a drain, it slows everything down and it’s too methodical.

We actually made a conscious decisions to keep systems simplified, and then we added complications in other areas. Combat isn’t combat to us; it’s not about killing enemies, it’s about an obstacle in the hero’s path that’s then a problem solving space that you need to figure out how to get through. That’s where a lot of the brainpower use takes place. We have some more puzzles and problem solving inside of our traversal, but it’s not super consequential. We’re not intending to do that.

So again, it’s a conscious choice for us to try and maintain a sense of balance and flow for the game. There are ways to do it…

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TSA: I want to see that next, I’m curious about that!

Bruce: A behind the scenes of all the things we tried?

TSA: [laughs] Well, you know, when you put a jet pack on the next character you create… Going from jet packs to jet setting, you’ve got a lot of ground to cover and new locations in this game. Has it felt a little like making a Bond film, with trying to avoid covering the same locations and ideas again?

Bruce: I dunno, I come from old school gaming where you had the ice level, the fire level, the jungle level. If you really take it as a lesson learned for game development, what that’s really doing is getting you excited to get to the next level, to see what that next thing is. By having a variety of environments, it’s a way for us to keep the player invested in finding out what’s around the next corner.

Defining a new location isn’t so much about recreating it. We have jungles in this and we had jungles in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, but the jungle that we’ve done on the PlayStation 4 is wildly different to what we could do and what we could even imagine doing at the inception of this franchise.

So it’s more about how we take the lessons learned with colour scripting the arc of the story, shape design to elicit different emotions subconsciously in the narrative, how you choose to shape a tree or structure, is an environment is slightly tilted, which makes the player feel slightly on edge? Or is it more stable and open, with a more placid and calming feeling?

We’re trying to exploit the concepts of art design to do that, so it’s not so much about creating areas, it’s what gives us opportunities and we stylise it from there.

I’m not sure if that answers your question or not! It is and it isn’t an issue for us!

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TSA: How does the theft of Uncharted 4 make you feel, that the game’s been ripped from you before you’re ready for it to be in people’s hands? I mean, you are ready, but it’s before release.

Bruce: For me personally, I don’t care about the money. Sony cares about the money and Sony should certainly be like, “We need to get these people, we need to stop these criminals.” This is against the law, but that’s not my issue.

My issue is spoiling things for the player, because we craft these experiences and we have so many gems, we really go out of our way to preserve the experience for the player. […] We wrestle and fight over what we want to release, because we don’t ever want to ever give too much and we don’t want to spoil moments.

Moments are also just beat by beat what happens, but those little surprises [aren’t there] if you’ve already seen it. If you have a piece of cake the first time, and it’s the most delicious cake you’ve ever had, you want to go back for a second. The second piece, you’re like, “Uh, it’s not quite as good as the first…” The third one, you just end up with stomach ache.

It’s like, if players are seeing this stuff and their eyes are already being exposed to these moments, it diminishes the impact of that moment. So, with today’s culture of Twitch streaming, YouTube videos and everything being out there for people to watch… and I know it’s the player’s prerogative. If they want to expose themselves to that, that’s their choice, but we try our best to protect the fans that want the pure experience.

That’s the thing that I get upset about, because we have major moments inside of this game that can have a huge impact on the player. They’re specifically crafted and we’ve work very hard to craft this moment to make it land, make it impactful and to resonate into what you feel. If that’s spoiled for the player, then that hurts me, that hurts that player and diminishes that thing, and that sucks.

Straight up, as the creator, that sucks.

So I guess, go Sony. Get the criminals.


Thanks to Bruce for talking to us about Uncharted 4 and everything that’s gone into it. You can now find and read our review of the game from this morning.

This interview came together as part of a European press junket for Uncharted 4 in Rome, with travel and accommodation having been provided by Sony for the event.

1 Comment

  1. Lovely interview. I always enjoy it when Druckmann or Straley have things to chat about.

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