EL33TONLINE: News tag archive: naughtydog

Naughty Dog has revealed their next project on SCEA’s PlayStation Blog and it is none other than, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

Although details of the game are still sketchy at the moment, we do know that Nathan Drake’s next adventure will be set in a snowy region and that it revolves around the voyages of 13th century explorer Marco Polo. We gathered this intel from the teaser trailer (below) as well as the January 2009 cover of Game Informer (which promises the first in-depth look at Uncharted 2).

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves will add a free climbing mechanic and stealth gameplay. PS3 gamers can also look forward to new locations, characters and a focus on the game’s story.

If you are a fan of the Uncharted series, make sure you tune in to the 2008 Video Game Awards on the 14th of December, the world premiere of the first trailer will debut at 9pm on Spike.

If you want to know why we are so excited about this sequel, make sure you read our review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

We described it as “featuring great production values, some decent acting, great action sequences, top notch graphics, special effects and an enjoyable story.” And, as if that wasn’t enough, it is “great fun and varied enough to lift Drake’s Fortune above the source material to be one of the best games on the PlayStation 3.”

Pretty good in other words.

Here we go again. Some company makes a claim fairly early in the life-cycle of a console that they’re using ‘less than half’ of that console’s power. So it is with Uncharted developer, Naughty Dog, revealing that they’re only using 30 to 40% of the PlayStation 3’s power. This time, however, there may be good reason to make such claims.

Naughty Dog have been working on a new set of tools called Edge, developed by ‘very, very senior programmers…really old-school programmers’ who are constantly looking for optimisations in their approach to making the PS3 churn faster. They’ve discovered some tricks to take full advantage of the PS3 and its specialised hardware, including assigning tasks to the multiple processors more efficiently.

This leads to Richard Lemarchand’s (co-lead game designer at Naughty Dog) statement: “That’s why we think we’re probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there’s this great, untapped potential. All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years.”

Uncharted looked amazing. Look forward to more of that in the future, then.

Source: threespeech.com

Naughty Dog have released a 13 meg patch for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, that will allow players to earn Trophies, the equivalent of the Xbox 360’s Achievements.

Uncharted’s in-game ‘medal’ achievements worked out perfectly for the new reward system and translates perfectly to the Trophy system. Because of the availability of downloadable save games on-line, however, you’ll have to start a new game to earn the Trophies. It’s a great game, so this gives you an excuse to pick it up again. To get the patch, simply start up Uncharted and you’ll be prompted to download it.

The Trophy system was introduced in one of the latest PS3 firmware updates. Not only will you be able to earn these Trophies in future games, such as Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet, but some developers are retro-fitting the system into games already released, as is the case with Uncharted.