Naughty Dog Interview

We were recently lucky enough to sit down with Evan Wells, Co-President of Naughty Dog Interactive.

These are the guys who brought us such hits as Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Dexter – and now have another much-anticipated title, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, lined up for release here in NZ soon!

NZGamer: Hi Evan. To start off, how about you tell our readers a bit about yourself, what you do in the company, and maybe a bit about the company itself.

Evan Wells: Okay, sure. I’m the Co-President of Naughty Dog - we’re an exclusive developer for Sony, and we’re based in Santa Monica. There are about 85 people at the company right now, and over the course of the last 10-12 years we’ve made it our goal to make games that really showcase the PlayStation hardware, and make games that highlight the power that the systems have. We really focus on making one game at a time, so all our creative forces go to making the best game possible.

NZGamer: As you mentioned, you have been around for a while now – what’s been keeping you guys going all these years?

Evan: Well it’s really been the team that we work with - everybody is very passionate and inspired by each other. Uncharted, our new game, is a perfect example where so many creative people have come together – they really make each other enthusiastic for what they’re working on. I’m impressed myself, after having watched the game develop for two years, of what we’re capable of creating – for example, there are so many small details in the game that are so great, but I never thought we’d be able to get in there, but the team made it possible by really buckling down and going the extra mile to make this something special.

NZGamer: Let’s talk about Uncharted – how did it come about, and what drove you to create something that was a step removed from the more cartoony games you made previously?

Evan: Sure, well back in the days of the PS1 and PS2, we were limited by the hardware; we felt that in order to really make the best looking game and the most immersive experience we could, we had to have that layer of stylization there – you just couldn’t get the detail you wanted if going for a realistic look.

With the PS3, we looked at the specs and thought it was the right time to jump in the deep end and do something completely different; that made us have to really learn more about the technology, and learn more techniques. The challenge really captured our interest, and also allowed us to do something that would be different not only for us, but also compared to what everyone else was doing in this generation.

So many games are currently taking a Sci-Fi or post-apocalyptic route, where everything is drab, grey, or brown. We wanted to something that was vibrant, lush, organic, and natural; we wanted to do something in a jungle setting, with nature having overtaken man-made structures, setting up a juxtaposition of nature overtaking man.

We also looked at what kind of genre we wanted to tap into; we did a lot of research into the action adventure genre in various media. It’s actually a perfect formula for exciting video games – there’s exciting gunplay, wild hand to hand combat, leaps of faith, crazy out of this world environments, vehicle chases, and more. So why haven’t more people tapped into this genre? We just figured it’d the perfect video game.

NZGamer: When looking at the game, obviously Indiana Jones comes to mind – what were your major sources of inspiration for the game?

Evan: Indiana Jones really revitalized the whole genre that we’re working in, at least in terms of movies. As a whole, the genre has a long and rich history, with coloured books, tv shows, movies, all in the ‘boys own’ adventure style. We wanted to do something along these lines, but set in the modern day – yet still have something that tapped into all these conventions that were established over the last 100 years. Typically these stories are period pieces – there’s a lot of romance and nostalgia in them; so we asked ourselves, what could we do in the modern day that captured that spirit?

NZGamer: How have you found developing on the PS3? What kind of challenges did you have to overcome? What has it really allowed you to do?

Evan: I think the leap from the PS2 to PS3 was much bigger than the jump from PS1 to PS2. Now you’re talking about multiple processors in the machine, so you have to completely change the way you program. You’re talking about using pixel shaders – it’s no longer about how many polygons you have onscreen, but how pretty your pixels are; it’s a completely different methodology in many ways. The road is pretty rough for a lot of people, and it was a big learning process for us; you have six to eight months of ‘oh my gosh what do we do?’ But we just have such a talented group that now we already feel as comfortable as we did on the PS2.

NZGamer: You said Uncharted has been in development for two years. How long were you working for before you got finalized dev kits?

Evan: Quite some time! We have literally only been on dev kits for about a year. During the first full year of development we weren’t on final dev kits. It was quite an awkward way to develop!

NZGamer: There are a lot of technical effects in Uncharted that people are getting excited about. One that struck me was the way your character’s clothes actually get wet when you go into water, and then dry off naturally over time. Which effects in the game have gotten you most excited?

Evan: Well that one was pretty exciting, because for the longest time we never thought it’d be possible to do; we thought we’d have do it on the PS4! But our tech guys got it working and really blew my socks off. We’ve got so many effects like that – our water effects in general are something we really wanted to concentrate on. We wanted water to be pervasive throughout entire game, whether you were near a stream, a waterfall, a puddle, or whatever. We just wanted it there, and have it rendered beautifully. All those little details – I like to think of them as integral parts of the entire experience. Those details all add up to making a game great, not just good.

NZGamer: You’ve touched a bit on the setting already, but tell our readers what kind of story they can expect.

Evan: While we were doing the whole modern adventure thing, we still wanted to tap into a particular history – something that’s an important part of this genre. We found that there were a lot of interesting things you can do by looking at mysteries that are sort of right under your nose. We thought, let’s tap into a historical figure that’s not super well known, but you may have heard of him at school once. So we picked Sir Francis Drake, a very accomplished privateer – at least by English standards. In the opinion of the Spanish, he was a terrible pirate who wrecked havoc on their coastline. He was supposed to have made so much treasure that he couldn’t take it all back home with him, and cashed it around the place in various parts of the world, which makes for a good treasure hunting setup.

So we wondered, what if our main character had some sort of lineage to Drake? He was meant to have died childless, but we thought about all the women he was supposed to have had, and sort of wondered about that a lot. So our main character makes it a goal to not only find Drake’s treasure, but also to establish his family ancestry.

NZGamer: How important is the story in the game? Many developers would like to believe that their story is important, but to many gamers it’s just an unimportant dressing, especially in action games. On the other end of the scale you have RPGs whose primary focus is telling a narrative. Whereabouts on the scale do you sit with Uncharted?

Evan: We’re trying to sit somewhere where no other game has sat. We’re trying to do something that is unique. Back when the CD format was taking off, people used to say they wanted to make interactive movies – well we want to do that, but actually do it well. With this hardware you can really create these characters that have life, that have personality and real emotions; and you can render them in such a way that you can actually connect with them. So we concentrated a lot on our story - our writers have done an excellent job, and our actors have really given performances that shine. Basically we wanted to make it feel like a big-budget summer blockbuster.

NZGamer: In terms of gameplay, where have you gotten your inspiration from? What have you tried to improve on based on what you’ve seen in other titles? How will Uncharted distinguish itself from the pack?

Evan: Well the common game we’re compared to is Tomb Raider, because both characters are treasure hunters. But I really think that’s where our similarities end. We went out of our way to make sure our game and character was different to Tomb Raider and Lara Croft. She’s a perfect acrobatic who is never shaken or caught short in her environments. Our hero, on the other hand, is very much an everyman: he’s fallible; he stumbled when he runs; he rolls out of his landings when he falls too far; he breathes heavy when he’s running too hard; he flinches when bullets go by. We really tried to get that emotion into our character - that he’s just someone who’s been thrust into this situation that’s over their head, and they’re struggling to get by. So we really tried to stand apart from that standpoint.

We also really wanted to capture and improve upon some elements from our other games – the three main elements of the game are hand to hand fighting, gunplay, and platform traversal. We looked at our own games like Jak & Dexter, and at ones like Prince of Persia, for the platform traversal sections. For the gunplay, we wanted cover to be important – our character couldn’t just run into the open and blast everyone. But we did want to have some wild west-type moves in there, like shooting at someone over your shoulder as your try to find a place to hide. And with the hand to hand combat, we didn’t want to make a complicated fighting game – it’s based a lot on context-sensitive moves, so you feel like you’re attached to the environment. Combined, we think it all helps make the game feel pretty fresh.

NZGamer: So what’s next for naughty dog? Going to have a well deserved holiday?

Evan: Oh yeah, a lot of holidays! We’ll be having a post-mortem, we’ll see what we did right and wrong, and start planning out what we’ll be doing next – we’ve been so busy working on Uncharted that we haven’t talked about what we’re doing next at all!

NZGamer: Thanks for your time Evan!

Evan: Thank you very much!