Get ready for adventure: We’re excited to celebrate the launch this week of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection on PC!
We’ve already equipped budding treasure hunters with PC features and specs so you can enjoy Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: The Lost Legacy optimized for PC by Iron Galaxy Studios.
Whether the series is, well, uncharted territory for you, or you’re a seasoned caver who’s survived crushing encounters, we thought the PC debut of the Uncharted series offered a chance to look back at how these two adventures pushed the franchise forward. We’ve uncovered some details about how Naughty Dog took a central pillar of Uncharted gameplay to new heights.
Rise time
With Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End marking the franchise’s first original release on PlayStation 4, the team saw a chance to push the franchise forward. Climbing is a prime example of this next-gen evolution; Uncharted 4 introduced a level of control players had never had before while anchoring Nathan Drake’s moves with stunning animations.
“With Uncharted 4, we wanted to add more depth to the escalation and look at it in a more realistic way,” animation director Jeremy Yates explained.
A trip to an indoor climbing gym and lessons from an instructor early in production helped ground this effort. This trip yielded some pretty meaningful lessons for Uncharted 4’s new climbing system. The team was equipped with first-hand experience and visual references to understand balance and weight placement, as well that reflection that must go into every movement.
“When we climbed the wall ourselves, one of the first things we noticed was how much weight you had on your feet. That really translated into how the animations worked,” said Emilia Schatz, Lead Game Designer.
The team tried a multitude of potential routes to take the system, ranging from the inclusion of a stamina bar to free climbing that would allow players to scale a mountain on a route of their choosing. There was a lot of fun and tension to be had, but the team needed to think about where escalation fit into the overall game.
“It almost got too complex. The important thing about each of our systems is that we overlay them with other systems. So while the climbing itself was truly amazing, we had to remember that Uncharted 4 isn’t just a climbing game,” Schatz said.
With some of these systems removed, the goal became clearer: leverage escalation in Uncharted 4 to connect the player to Nathan Drake and eventually Chloe Frazer in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. And that meant giving players more control over escalation in Uncharted than ever before.
Give a hand
“We wanted to be able to give the player very fine-grained control and full analog control over where Drake places his hands. That’s where the range system was trained,” Yates explained.
Uncharted 4’s range system allows you to do more than just jump from socket to socket along a clearly defined route. Using the controller’s left analog stick, the player can accurately determine how far and at what angle Drake is reaching. In practice, it feels fluid and realistic, but behind the scenes there’s a clever system of rings that accounts for Drake’s possible moves. Many animations are needed to make every move successful.
“It was a huge challenge to animate and design all of these poses and then from each of them [points]the delta between your base and the grapple location, that position can have a number of very specific animations,” Yates explained.
To ensure that what was depicted in-game reflected the actual climbing terrain, the team built an adjustable rock face at the mocap stage and captured parkour athlete Jesse La Flair tracking the various Nate’s moves.
“We replicated those rings, and there are pre-drilled holes in all of those different positions so we could easily move the handles… We had Jesse climb every conceivable combination we could give him” , Yates explained, noting that it allowed him to really ground the physicality of Drake’s moves.
To help achieve the smooth motion of the reach system, lead programmer Ryan Broner was among those working to get this deep climbing system to work properly.
“The big change from Uncharted 3 was being able to hold two edges at once, and they could be any distance apart,” Broner said. This meant that work had to be done to make sure the upper body would move in the right direction, but, as the team learned in the climbing gym, the feet were just as essential to take into account. account.
“[We worked to have] the feet actually seek an edge instead of letting them hang and sway.
“Ryan was…really taking his whole body [inverse kinematics] working with the four limbs and your root and how they move together. It helped us create a much more organic system to climb on than we were able to before,” Yates said.
Infusing climbing with more natural and variable movement has also helped make the actual paths Drake takes more dynamic and rewarding for the player.
“It allowed us to create more organic rock walls. Previously the distance you could move handles from where Nathan Drake was [felt] pretty short,” Schatz explained. “In Uncharted 4, we were able to space them out because Nathan Drake could hit quite a few. By being able to space them out, we could ensure that the takes themselves, visually, did not always imply a precise route. They were spaced far enough apart that you had to try it out yourself and get used to the range of its reach.
Not only are the climbing routes more naturally integrated into the environment, but thanks to a set of tools that the team worked with, more complex routes could be created to allow players to get creative in how they wanted to progress.
“The organic integration into the wall has been automated. What you see in-game…it’s dynamically placed,” Yates said, noting that background artists didn’t have to come in and virtually sculpt the location of each take. “In real time, we could move the handles… It was so easy to add these handles, so it was easier for us to develop what we called ‘Swiss cheese’ for some of these walls. We tried to give the player the possibility to find his own way.
Players can experiment with how they scale each stretch of rock or dilapidated building. Another way for players to have more power over climbing is the piton. Born out of experimenting with a freer climbing system (you can see the idea of using two pitons at once below), the piton introduces a bit of puzzle solving to the player.
Pitons come into play when players rush towards specific walls, requiring the right timing and angle to hook the piton into the wall where they want to continue progressing.
“We want you to be creative in how you can move around and place your grips. You get an idea, as a player I have to decide ‘Where do I want Nathan Drake’s piton to be so I can jump on that ledge over there,’ Schatz said. “The piton is a really cool thing that we couldn’t have done without Nathan Drake’s analog reach [introduced in Uncharted 4].”
With all the ideas the Naughty Dog team implemented – and lessons learned from the ones they didn’t – Escalation in Uncharted 4 offers more precise analog control over the climbing by Nathan Drake. This implementation continued with Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, which features Chloe Frazer as the protagonist while retaining all the work that went into Nathan Drake’s escalation mechanics. Lost Legacy allowed the team to integrate the piton, which would later feature in A Thief’s End, throughout Chloe’s adventure.
“We were really happy with how it came together in Uncharted 4…and we were able to incorporate it a lot more into The Lost Legacy, and it really came into its own there,” Schatz said.
After the development journey of this feature, the team had some big takeaways.
“[Uncharted 4’s climbing showed] the importance of feedback in player systems,” Broner said. “In Uncharted 4, you push the stick, and even though you can’t reach anything, you see the body start to move in a certain direction. Getting that feedback lets you adjust to the direction you want to go in a way that feels natural and makes you feel more connected to the character.
“We always strive for a sense of grounding…because when that works really well, you identify more with the character, you become more invested in the character,” Schatz said.
Everything that has evolved in the climbing system, from the reach system to the piton, to the fluidity and realism of movement, allows players to engage with Uncharted characters like never before. We hope long-time fans can enjoy this essential part of the Uncharted experience on a deeper level, and we’re excited for newcomers to experience Nathan and Chloe’s climbing, combat, and more. Unexplored: The Legacy of Thieves Collection is available October 19, 2022 on Steam and Epic Games Store.
