Uncharted 1’s Controls & Camera Were Originally Pretty Different, Says Ex-Naughty Dog Developer

Uncharted 1’s Camera Originally Had A Lot in Common with the Old Tomb Raider Games

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune underwent a pretty big overhaul in terms of controls & camera in the last six months of development, said former Naughty Dog tools programmer and the lead developer of 2018’s Return of the Obra Dinn, Lucas Pope, in a recently published interview.

Uncharted

“One of the cool things about Uncharted 1 is, we had no fucking idea what we were doing,” Pope said to Ars Technica. Pope added that after the release of Gears of War 1, Naughty Dog realized that Gears’ style of third-person combat would be better than what the team had originally worked on.

“‘Uncharted 1 was announced, and then Gears [of War] came out,’ Pope says. ‘And Gears invented the modern third-person shooter.’ Naughty Dog had originally begun its work on Uncharted with more of a Tomb Raider control system, Pope says, which meant more auto-rolling and auto-aiming,'” Ars Technica reported.

“Suddenly, Gears came out and showed them how to do it. So we changed everything, six months before release,” Pope added.

“The short-story version of ‘everything’ is a shift in camera perspective, controls, and general movement to incorporate more of an angled, third-person perspective, rather than using the behind-the-back standard of classic Lara Croft adventures,” Ars Technica also reported.

It is common for games in development to have a lot of cut content, however “to see the caliber of stuff that was cut, that was pretty insane,” Pope said.

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