How is the level design of the larger non-set-piece type battles?
Smaller = just the odd guy you have to kill while traversing the environment linearly.
Set piece = some crazy pre-determined sequence (even if there is some freedom in how to approach them) -- such as the entire E3 gameplay demo.
Larger, non-set-piece = "regular" major battle, such as the various snowy village battles in U2, shipyard battle in U3, etc.
---
The questions, more specifically, about the latter: Is there tactical freedom? Is there a lot of verticality / unexpectedly designed battle arenas? Is it more similar to Uncharted 2 (very vertical, tactical) or Uncharted 3 (flat, lots of enemy "waves")?
(I've always loved the set pieces in 2 and 3, of course. Everyone does. And the E3 demo made it clear this wasn't going to change. But it was the meat-and-potatoes battling level design that made Uncharted 2 such a complete and bad-ass all-around game. The game wasn't just all flashiness... there was substance too. Uncharted 3 was a real step back on this front.)
Finally, Uncharted 2 was really heavily skewed towards action/shooting. Uncharted 3 added quite a lot more adventuring (puzzles and exploration) into the mix. Is 4 more like 2 or 3? Feel free to spoiler-tag the answer to that (but don't put actual spoilers in there!).
P.S. The recent Madagascar previews suggested that there are REALLY big areas which can be approached however you want, almost like in open-world games like Far Cry 3. Does the intensity of the non-set-piece battles suffer from this level of openness? Or are there both U2-ish large areas and the Madagascar-like huge areas?