It happens with every game, as inevitably as the tides, there will always be a segment of pure filler that accomplishes little with regards to advancing the plot.
This is that moment for Uncharted 3.
As we discuss in this episode, a lot of what we’ll see in this week’s block is the direct result of the design pipeline at Naughty Dog during this era of game development. They would frequently create entire segments and set pieces before having any idea of where they would fit in the story, and it would be up to the writing team to figure out how to tie them into the narrative. It was a holdover of design principles from the old Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter days when games didn’t need to justify why a mission or level was included in the final release.
Some of the studio’s best work, like the famous train level from Uncharted 2, came about as a direct result of this pipeline. The team wanted to try making a train level where the stage was a physics object moving along a track in real-time, and they threw a narrative justification unto it later. Despite the way it came about, the implementation was seamless, and most people probably couldn’t tell it was shoehorned into the plot.
Unfortunately for Uncharted 3, that’s not the case with either the chase scene with Talbot or the shipyard, which serves as one of the game’s big technical showcases. During the hour-long segment, the pacing comes to a grinding halt as nothing of import happens to keep the story moving forward. If this entire shipyard area was cut from the final release, I doubt anyone would have even noticed.
And as we’ll talk a bit more about next time, it doesn’t help that the section isn’t that much fun to play.
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