We spoke at length with Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells and creative director Amy Hennig about creating a historical mystery, planning multiplayer, deciding on Move implementation, and what's up with the PSP2.

Before you dig into the interview, be sure to check out the first unedited gameplay footage of Uncharted 3 right here if you haven't already.

After such a tremendous hit like Uncharted 2, how do you come back to the drawing board and try to top that?

Evan Wells: 
It’s a tall order. We’re our own harshest critics and we set out to make a game that we thought would be fun to play. To get the reception that Uncharted 2 got was definitely a big surprise for us and now we do feel a pretty big amount of pressure externally but I don't think it exceeds yet the pressure we put on ourselves. So we have a lot of creative and passionate people here who just wanted to start hitting the ground right away after they came back from their vacations. I think what they put together for this demo is just the tip of the iceberg of what you’re going to see in the rest of the game.



Amy Hennig
: What’s nice too is what we typically do when we’re conceiving the game is we go back and forth between what would be awesome and let’s do this in the story and see how they complement each other. But after Uncharted 2 we’d added so much to the engine that enabled us to do some set pieces that we couldn’t have considered before and so being able to kind of look at the genre of adventure movies and stories and thinking about all of the conventions like escaping from a burning building -- you know, something that we wanted to tackle but obviously didn't have the opportunity to or didn't have the technology to in the past.

So sometimes we just come to the table saying, “We've got to do one of these. We’ve got to have an escape from a burning building.” Well, where should we put it in the game? Where are they and why is it burning? And we’ve got lots of set pieces like that that we have planned. So you try not to repeat yourself but at the same time you want to make sure those peak moments are in the game.

Wells: 
A lot of that comes from technology too. Like we’ve got some of the most amazing programmers out there. People asked us whether we could get more out of the PlayStation 3 after Uncharted 2 and they set to work and have proven that they can. Like Justin mentioned we’re doing everything in stereoscopic 3D and that took months and months of continued work to further optimize the engine to get more performance to allow that and to allow even more particle effects and more physics and dynamics so once we have all of these new bells and whistles that the programmers give us, the game designers and artists just get to go crazy and come up with the cool set-pieces that are going to make the game really exciting.