Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

While most people play Uncharted games for the single-player narrative, it goes without saying that the die-hard fans of the series are chomping at the bits to get their hands on Nathan Drake's upcoming adventure. The multiplayer beta for arguably the most anticipated exclusive game in the PlayStation 4's history kicked off this weekend, so we took the opportunity to catch up with Naughty Dog's Robert Cogburn, the lead game design for the game's multiplayer portion.

What do you hope to get out of the Uncharted 4 multiplayer beta?
Data, data, data, data, data, data, data! One of the reasons that the beta is so rich with the wide variety of guns, sidekicks, mysticals – a large variety of things – is the fact that we're trying to ensure that when we release it to retail, we have the most balanced multiplayer experience possible. That's really the high-level goal of this whole thing, just to dial everything in. 

Most people, when they think of Uncharted, they think of the big narrative moments, the huge set pieces, and everything that's in the main storyline. What are the challenges associated with working on the multiplayer component of a game that is so well known for its storytelling and cinematic moments?
It's interesting that you bring that up because it's definitely been an ongoing process. We kind of felt with Uncharted 2, while it was a sound multiplayer experience, over time it became dry pretty quick. With Uncharted 3, while a lot of people enjoyed that multiplayer experience, again it didn't have the level of depth that you kind of come to expect – the things that give breath to these online games. We kind of felt that with The Last of Us, it dialed in to how we can create depth in the moment-to-moment. And so with those lessons, the challenge for Uncharted 3 was to create systems that offer short story moments between players. What are the things we can do to create those interesting narrative moments that will be unique from other online games?

And I think the challenge for the online experience compared to single-player is that we couldn't bring those narrative moments over obviously. But what can we introduce in the moment-to-moment to create narrative experiences specific to competitive multiplayer, but still something that the franchise was known for? And over time that was something that we just tried and tried and tried to dial in – like Uncharted 3 we had the levels where you're on the airplane running down the runway or the train level – we're constantly aware that we want to introduce something that created cool narrative moments, and I kind of feel like with Uncharted 4 and the things we've introduced like the sidekicks, the mysticals, and the rich loadout system, we're sort of honing in on that direction of what it takes to make it happen.

What was the original goal behind the new mechanics like the sidekicks?
The soul of Naughty Dog is iteration – we always prototype, prototype, prototype, prototype – and we were prototyping a wide variety of interesting gameplay-mode ideas. Through that iteration process we had these little nuggets of things that, despite some failures, were still pretty cool. At the end of the day, we sort of stumbled upon sidekicks and with that we sort of started thinking, "Okay, sidekicks are cool because genre-wise, the hero has a sidekick and typically the sidekick has some sort of special ability that the hero doesn't. What can we do to leverage that?" So we ended up coming up with a wide variety of sidekicks.

It was just sort of a thing that with the PlayStation 4 we were able to do, and as we were playing with them over time we realized it was pretty badass. Putting your sniper at the top of the horseshoe in our island map is just marking and pegging motherf---ers in that long hallway there, and it's a badass experience. Additionally, we really like the idea of being in a pinch and being outnumbered and being able to spawn someone who can help you out real quick and give you an opportunity to get away or give you an opportunity to move forward. We really dug how that was feeling for us internally, so we just sort of carried them all the way through.

Was there ever the idea of taking less of a competitive angle and approaching it with this idea of a sidekick from a cooperative perspective?
I think you'll see some stuff in the future that will really leverage these guys in an interesting way. The iteration process I was talking about earlier... we really tried some cool stuff out. Some of the ideas were like, "Holy s---, this is going to be great, but we don't have enough time to do this." I think in the future you'll see some interesting things we'll be doing with sidekicks in that regard.

As soon as I saw that it was Nathan and Sam in the main story, I always thought it would be cool for Naughty Dog to do some sort of cooperative puzzle solving. I always wanted a mode where you would team up with a friend and just solve puzzles like the ones in the story modes together.
Yeah! Wouldn't that be pretty cool? [Laughs] That would be pretty cool. I can't wait to share with you some of the iteration things that hopefully we might see in the future. But yes, we know that would be pretty f---ing cool.

On the next page, we talk more about the mysticals and get into the influences of the multiplayer modes.

How do you take inspiration from the story and bring it over into the multiplayer? Are we going to see familiar moments from the Uncharted 4 single-player recreated in the multiplayer?
We're not going to see a lot of the big set-piece moments that you're seeing in single-player. What we've done instead is that we've embraced the universe and in embracing it, we've introduced our mysticals. If you're a fan of the franchise, or even if you're not a fan of the franchise, these mysticals are really big game-changers. It's pretty f---ing sick as a fan of Uncharted to say I'm able to purchase the Wrath of El Dorado and chuck it at my opponents and take 'em out. It feels fantastic to realize I'm getting a Cintamani Stone and using it to revive my allies in multiplayer. And no doubt we've taken liberties with some of these things compared to what they do in the fiction and what we're doing in multiplayer.

The story doesn't directly impact multiplayer, but I can say that the universe has had a huge impact on multiplayer. We brought over a wide variety of characters spanning the entire franchise. We brought over a s---ton of the cast, we're leveraging all of this mystical stuff, and some of the things you mentioned sound really cool and maybe in the future, we'll be talking about how we'll be catapulting off of those ideas you mentioned maybe.

With the multiplayer being in a live online environment, I'd imagine it's easier to tweak and mold based on feedback than it is for the single-player. 
It is! And you know what? Let's take that one step further. With this being our last Uncharted game, and in the standard mantra of any online game, you want to carry it through for as long as possible, so this gives us opportunities to sort of expand the universe. What are the cool moments we can introduce in the moment-to-moment that sort of broaden what Uncharted is? And so not only is it, to your point, molding and fixing things, but we have full intention of trying to carry this online experience for as long as possible. And to do that, you have to do some really cool s---. It's not just weapons tuning and adding some new guns. You've got to introduce some cool s---.

We can speak to all of that stuff in the future, but we're really excited about what this allows us to do. We're fans of Uncharted; we want to make it bigger and better!

And even at this point before launch, you're introducing a ton of new mechanics. How does that play into how hard it is to balance this experience?
That's challenging, but a large part of it is we have some incredibly talented game designers on the MP team and it's been a challenge, but it all comes down to that iteration process. For example, the Wrath of El Dorado started off as being this sort of bomb that just nuked everybody. It felt amazing just to see bodies fly up in the sky when we cast this thing, but that wasn't the kind of power-level experience we wanted to go for. In balancing it out, we're constantly asking ourselves key questions like, "What are we trying to go for with this?" With the Wrath of El Dorado, one of the key questions was, "What can we do with this to break combat fronts?" because in the moment-to-moment multiplayer, we're really trying to emphasize combat fronts between the two teams. The Wrath of El Dorado facilitates that. You can chuck it now at the enemy team, and instead of it killing them in one shot it sends out these specters that chase them down and damage them so they have to move out of cover. It's not a one-hit kill and you can get away from it, but it's just us teeing up these questions of how we want these things to function and what we need to do to tune them together.

Action movies like Indiana Jones obviously has great inspiration for the story of Uncharted. Do moments in those movies work to inspire how you design certain modes or maps to lead to the kinds of moments you want to see play out in multiplayer matches?
They don't have a big impact on the map design, but what's had a big impact on our map design is just trying to create the ability for teams to work together. Teamwork has been a huge thing for us to focus on and that's had a high impact on our maps. Another thing that's had a high impact on our maps – which is very Indiana Jones-like – is the grappling hook. The grappling hook is just sick to use in MP right now. You're able to connect multiple grapple hooks to cross spaces, you're able to leverage one-hit melees. It's been those kinds of things that have had high impact on our map design.

No doubt, we say things like, "You remember that moment in Indiana Jones?" or we still try to get a boulder sequence somewhere in our multiplayer maps. [Laughs] The movies have an obvious impact on Uncharted as a whole, but I don't know if they've had a big impact on MP.

I think the reason I thought of Indiana Jones influencing mechanics in multiplayer was because of you talking about the specters attacking enemies in cover. That instantly made me think about Raiders of the Lost Ark.
There is definitely a 12-year-old boy in the back of my brain screaming out these things, recalling these moments, and I'm listening to him.

Anything else you want to let the community know about Uncharted 4's multiplayer?
You know, this beta and this multiplayer game is just impossible without all of the hard work from the studio – particularly the multiplayer team. We're busting our asses to make something really cool.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End releases on March 18, 2016. To learn more about the game as a whole, you can check out our online coverage hub full of exclusive interviews, videos, and more. Just click the banner below and get ready for information overload!