A former Naughty Dog developer has revealed that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune featured dynamic scaling difficulty in order to make the game longer.
In a new interview with FRVR, ex-Naughty Dog designer Benson Russell opened up about how Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune had a somewhat difficult and complicated development process. For instance, he noted that the team designed environments without accounting for how combat would operate within them and had to find ways to make it work. However, their biggest challenge was that, after everything was set in place, the game was very short.
Russell joked that there was no way they could sell a five-hour-long game with no multiplayer for $60, so they came up with a strategic solution: dynamic difficulty. The game’s difficulty scales, and it’s partially to slow the player down and extend their overall playtime.
“We ended up putting a dynamic difficulty system in, but its key thing was to slow the player down if they were too good,” he said. “That’s one of the big ones. That’s one of reasons why Uncharted 1 gets so hard. If you’re doing really good for the difficulty level you have it set on — it’s all time-based! We would do a bunch of focus tests and we would grab the average times per encounter… if you beat a combat encounter faster than the average that we had, we would start cranking the difficulty.”
The dynamic difficulty system was featured in all three of the original Uncharted games, but it was tuned more carefully to match your skill level rather than to control the pacing of the game itself. So, if you ever felt like the difficulty dramatically spiked in the first Uncharted title, you’re not crazy. Naughty Dog simply thought you were playing the game too fast and put some obstacles in your way to slow you down.
Russell also recently spoke about how he is uninterested in a remake of the first Uncharted game. He believes the games largely hold up and that a remake would require Naughty Dog to make big changes that risk altering what fans love about them. Whether a remake of the first game ever happens remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be shocking, given studios are mining their old titles for new releases.
Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN’s news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.