How did you determine the difficulty of the new Brutal mode?
Bluepoint took their best Q&A tester and had him beat the game multiple times. Each time he did, they adjusted different things, until he couldn't finish it anymore. After this they went back to the previous revision that he could finish. So that's Brutal: pretty much the hardest setting the game can be finished at by a very skilled player. It's a way to reward people who are very skilled. It'll force you to think about each combat scenario.
[I had to ask] The Last of Us got a remaster, now the Uncharted games are remastered, there's the Jak HD collection on PS3... You can see where I'm going with this: in theory it's possible to get Crash back from Activision, right?
In theory there's always room for business partnerships, right? (laughs) I can't speak for what Activision wants to do with Crash.
When Uncharted 2 was shown for the first time, everyone noticed a huge graphical leap compared to the first game. When it came out, it was a huge hit that eclipsed the first game a bit. What happened in the years between Drake's Fortune and Among Thieves to make that kind of jump?
Development for Drake's Fortune was really challenging. We were moving on to a new console and had to let go of our own scripting and programming language we used for Jak, and we moved to C++. We created new tools, new pipelines, and we were starting to use middleware for the first time. On top of creating technology and a new engine, there was an actual game to be made too... We were doing a lot of different things at once, and we couldn't really get to everything we wanted to. Plus, at the time, there were a lot of people leaving the studio as well. It was a chaotic time. But by the time we were done with Drake's Fortune, we saw the potential of what we could do. We already had the foundation, then it was time to build on it.
Still, making such a leap in two years worth of development is impressive.
We had the engine set up, so that makes a big difference. But our source code was still very messy. We actually had to 'clean up' a lot after Drake's Fortune. So there were definitely challenges.
So Bluepoint had a tough time remastering Drake's Fortune then?
We didn't create assets in high res during the development of Drake's Fortune, because we weren't thinking about the future in that degree. So for DF there were a lot of assets that needed to be created. We almost lost the mySQL database, which is the overarching roadmap for how development goes, because that wasn't backed up. But luckily we found one pc that still had it! We even had to resurrect middleware licenses that expired.
But getting the sound effects back was a real challenge. They were mastered out of house by Technicolor Sound Services. However, they stopped their game business, so we couldn't work with them anymore. But we never had the masters at Naughty Dog either... And they didn't have anybody there that we used to work with. They could however send us string id's that we could figure out. Then we had to contact their IT department to get those string id's out of their backups. It took us 4 months just to get the masters for the sound effects. So it was very challenging in a lot of ways (laughs). Definitely the hardest of the 3 games.
In the collection, the games have had plenty of graphical upgrades, but what are the other additions or changes? Any small gameplay tweaks?
The aiming is sort of a hybrid of U2 and 3. We were also trying to address the complaint about bullet sponge enemies in DF in particular. We were trying to apply everything we've learned from the 3 games, so Drake's Deception had the least amount of tweaks.
