Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - (use spoiler tags please)

GameCrazy's code gives you more currency to start off with than you'd have if you didn't preorder.

As for Amazon, it says right under the price on the game's page:

Pre-order "Uncharted 2: Among Thieves" and get an Amazon exclusive treasure map. This bonus video strategy reveals the secret locations of treasures hidden within the game and can be viewed on both the PS3 and PSP systems. Access codes will be sent within 10 days after the game releases. Offer good while supplies last. Must be sold and shipped by Amazon.com to be eligible. › See more product promotions
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funny thing if you use a golden weapon in mp and you die you usually drop said weapon which can be picked up by someone else. that will be funny to see someone come in with their gold gun, get shot and then someone use that against them later.
 
You're right on Amazon, but all the descriptions of the GC one say:

Game Crazy - Currency Multiplier for Multiplayer

* The Uncharted 2 Currency Multiplier allows gamers to gain in-game currency and unlock bonuses faster than their opponents for a limited period.
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Thanks. I just wish I could confirm how "exclusive" this skin is. If it becomes some kind of DLC for $2-3, I would just wait.
 
Looks like a game I'll love to support the developers with a launch MSRP purchase, decision made easier knowing that the first has a sturdy pricetag (U:DF is still $50 new [at Amazon]).

Pre-order incentives have no power over me anymore!
 
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[quote name='Shrapnellistic']Looks like a game I'll love to support the developers with a launch MSRP purchase, decision made easier knowing that the first has a sturdy pricetag (U:DF is still $50 new [at Amazon]).

Pre-order incentives have no power over me anymore![/QUOTE]

It'll likely drop to $30-40 once U2 comes out to spur additional sales.

Certainly is impressive that a nearly 3 year old launch title game is still practically full price. Totally worth it, IMO.
 
[quote name='Ecofreak']Certainly is impressive that a nearly 3 year old launch title game is still practically full price. Totally worth it, IMO.[/QUOTE]


The game is not even two years old yet, so it certainly wasn't a launch title. But yeah, it's still a great game that demands the current price.
 
[quote name='Ecofreak']It'll likely drop to $30-40 once U2 comes out to spur additional sales.

Certainly is impressive that a nearly 3 year old launch title game is still practically full price. Totally worth it, IMO.[/QUOTE]

im with you all about buying uncharted 2 full price. no way i want to try and wait for a price drop. sucks you cant get uncharted 1 for cheaper outside of trading but its a great game.
 
This is the first time I've preordered so.. I preordered from Gamestop before the bonuses were announced and so I have nothing. Will they email me the bonus or am I suppose to go back to the store and get it myself. Hoping it's not the latter..
 
1upcoverstory.jpg


1up is doing a cover story on Uncharted 2 with articles all this week. The first covers ten things you don't know about Uncharted 2 along with new screens below. You can see what the others are about here.

Naughty Dog used to be a more prolific studio -- remember when we got one Crash Bandicoot game a year from 1996 to 1999? Or how Jak II, Jak 3, and Jak X: Combat Racing came out between 2003 and 2005? But now with the Uncharted franchise on the PS3, the studio's taken a slower, more deliberate schedule to its development calendar. To that end, we asked Naughty Dog for some facts and trivia to show us what the heck is going on behind the scenes of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves' development. So here is Naughty Dog community manager Arne Meyer's round-up of fast facts about the studio and its work on Uncharted 2. Plus, we have seven new screens to show off what all of these statistics are helping to create.

  • 1) Over 130,000 people participated in our Uncharted 2 Multiplayer Beta, covering players from 135 countries all over the world.
  • 2) The total of all multiplayer and co-op games played during the three weeks of our Beta was over 40,300 hours.
  • 3) In Uncharted: Drake's Fortune we had 104 individual environment files on the disc; in Uncharted 2 we have over 400.



  • 4) We spent over 30 days on our soundstage recording motion capture performances which resulted in over 90 minutes of cinematics -- along with a ton of in-game animations.
  • 5) Our daily back-up of data has been averaging over one terabyte lately... and that covers only Uncharted 2 assets and data.
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  • 6) We drank a s*** ton of soda -- over 30,000 cans -- and one bottle of bourbon during the two years of production on Uncharted 2.
  • 7) Between the 100+ Dogs working at the studio, we have over 16 nationalities and over 10 languages represented.
  • 8) We've moved twice in our history: From the Universal Studios lot next to Insomniac games to an office spot above a Santa Monica outdoor mall, and to our current space -- formerly Sony BMG's offices.
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  • 9) We still have several of the "Original Naughty Dogs" with us, who started the first Crash Bandicoot game almost 14 years ago!
  • 10) We've always had at least one dog "mascot" at Naughty Dog since the beginning. Currently our resident dogs are Pogo, a French Bulldog, and Trumpet, a Bichon Frise.
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http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3175515
 
They've only shown two or three areas at most, which far from everything that was listed in the Game Informer cover story.

Latest updates:

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9001114&publicUserId=5380025

Scooter wrote up a blog post on his and Matt's trip to Naughty Dog's place, so you see a few pictures of notable areas of the office. He aslo posted some gameplay impressions/information, too:

Now, Naughty Dog likes to call Gold Rush "Plunder [an objective-based team mode] versus A.I." I'll be the mean journalist and call it "Gears of War 2's Horde mode, with an objective." Though, I can see this being really really fun -- when you're with a cooperative team. Matt and I played along with multiplayer designer Justin Richmond, and it was easy to figure out who was the Naughty Dog employee and who was 1UP. Naughty Dog guy: grabs the treasure, makes sure to protect his buddies, and throws the treasure like a grenade to gain distance faster. 1UP editors: constantly running into walls and finding themselves in the "down, but not quite out" state and waiting for the Naughty Dog guy to run up and revive them.

As the team successfully places the treasure into the treasure box, the A.I. enemies become more aggressive, powerful, and smarter. Wave one usually has a buncha mooks that go down in a few hits (no matter where you hit them). By wave three or four, you get some medium-level guys who actually know how to use, and avoid grenades. By wave seven (as high as we got; at the moment, the game stops at wave ten), we felt like we were in some sort of ultra-heavy-guys-with-miniguns convention. Once Matt and I got a better handle, we actually followed a pretty solid strategy of "two guys protect the treasure holder" -- which worked until wave seven. Then we just got constantly cut down by the minigun guys. Even though I did a decent job of avoiding fire (heh) and then rescued either Matt or Justin when they went down down, when the screen was full of those fellows, they tore us apart. At the moment, Wells noted that four maps will support the Gold Rush mode; while I haven't played the regular co-op mode, I can tell that I already like Gold Rush more than regular Plunder or team deathmatch.

Finally, here're some nuggets about the single-player story-mode that I hadn't really seen elsewhere. So if you haven't concluded that this is TL;DR territory, here're the gameplay highlights from talking with Wells and Hennig (a.k.a. the part I assume will be cut-and-pasted across forums):

-While Uncharted had a 70/30 combat/exploration-and-puzzles ratio, many people assumed that Uncharted 2 will maintain that. Wells himself thinks that 60/40 is the accurate way to describe Uncharted 2, and sometimes depending on how you play, it might be an even 50/50 split. He credits that because Uncharted 2 breaks away from the "traversal, combat arena, repeat" formula,

-Here's a "70-plus percent" stat for you: Wells stated, "75% of the game, Nathan is accompanied by an ally." Hennig jokes that having someone else with Nathan for most of the game makes him look less crazy than in Uncharted, where he'd drop one-liners that no one else were around to hear. We'll actually reveal the exact number of allies in our interview tomorrow.

-Naughty Dog has learned from the lackluster boss battle at the end of Uncharted. Don't expect a lame QTE for boss battles (well, Naughty Dog prefers to call them "peak moments of excitation"); expect encounters to use your combat and traversal skills, rather than your ability to hit Square or Circle when prompted. "Peak moments of excitation" that Wells has mentioned include an encounter with a helicopter and another one with a freakin' tank.

-If you notice in the initial Warzone gameplay footage, Nathan has to deal with two different factions at war with each other. Wells confirmed that multi-faction fighting isn't just in that level; there will be other areas where Nathan has to juggle multiple forces at work. Then again, at least that means that occasionally, people won't automatically focus on just you.

-"There are no vehicles that Drake drives," is how Wells answers the, "are there still vehicles in Uncharted 2" question. "Every vehicle that he's involved in, someone else is driving or piloting," Wells continues. So if you were somewhat of a fan of those "Nathan drives a jetski while Elena shoots" sequences, sorry. "Driving just didn't fit with what we're doing for Uncharted 2." I asked some other resident Uncharted fans in the 1UP office, for their reaction. Sam Kennedy says, "I'm actually kind of disappointed, because while they could be better, those driving sequences did break up the action a bit." Alice Liang, on the other hand, quips, "Cool, I like being chauffeured around."

And on a final note, here's a wall that declares the creed of Uncharted. Everytime someone on staff wonders, "what the heck are we working on," this serves as a reminder -- it still applies to Uncharted 2 despite being made for Uncharted. I made it clickable so that you can zoom in and absorb the creed. That's it! Come back tomorrow for my interview with Amy Hennig and Evan Wells.
P.S. Alas, I saw neither Pogo nor Trumpet during my visit; so no new pics to establish which dog is cuter. Also, there is a designated "yoga area" of the office, but no one was partaking, so no yoga videos either.
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http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3175544

Interview with Amy Hennig and Evan Wells (It's four pages long, so I'll pick interesting questions/comments for me):

1UP: OK, here's an easier question: can you talk about the sources and inspiration for this "modern take on treasure hunting?" A lot of other games tend to cite the same movies -- Aliens, Goodfellas, Scarface and so forth, and I'm curious what atypical influences Uncharted 2 has.

AH: Obviously, we looked at a lot of stuff. When we started Uncharted, we did a ton of research and de-constructed a lot of movies, books, and comics in our genre. You're talking about everything from old adventure serials like Doc Savage to comics like Tintin, or old '30s adventure movies like Gunga Din and serials from the '50s, to adventure movies from the '80s and modern stuff like National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code. There's a lot of stuff -- we watched and read as much as we could, and plucked out the themes that we saw over and over again. Some of them were things that weren't really being taken advantage of in the medium, and a lot of it had to do with the humanization of the character and all that kind of stuff.

One of the main differences, I think, is that some of the movies and things we use for inspiration came out of the fallible hero idea. Which isn't at all new in movies, but is pretty new in games. It's the idea of the sort of "sloppy" combat -- the "sloppy" gunplay, and the "sloppy" hand-to-hand combat. It's not martial arts or tactical SWAT guys or Navy SEAL stuff. It's this guy who probably learned how to fight on the street, and can handle his guns but doesn't really know how to shoot them "right." He's not trained; when he throws a punch he'll throw himself off-balance and he can easily get clocked on the head. There's much more of that scrappy style. Everything has been sort of precise and tactical up to that point. And actually, that created a lot of technical challenges; the only way you have organic sloppiness is by not playing the same animation over and over again. For example, all of Drake's cover animations -- he probably had literally about 150 to 200 cover-taking animations -- whether he was low or high, or how he had his foot angled, and that was all done via a proprietary layered-animation system that we developed.

EW: Think of the effort we put into his run cycle, where he can be running for 60 seconds straight and you won't see the same loop twice. There will always be differences to his gait.

AH: It's one of those things that when done right, nobody notices, but when done wrong, everybody will really notice.

EW: I don't know if this is going to be completely obvious to people as they play though the game, but something that is different this time for Drake is that we beat him up like crazy. You probably can't count on your fingers and toes the number of times he gets completely knocked on his ass or on his head. You play through other video games, and you basically only fall down when you die. Drake is always getting knocked around.

1UP: Actually, with Tenzen being an ally, along with Chloe and Elena, can you say how many different allies Nathan will have over the course of the game?

EW: Hmm, at least four...

AH: [Mumbling incomprehensible names while counting off with her fingers] At least six.

EW: Six? Who am I forgetting?

AH: I don't want to say; how about "five and a half?"

EW: Oooh, OK. I got it.

AH: Five and a half, because there's a dwarf. [Laughs] But seriously, there're also things like situations where you have multiple allies like Chloe and Elena together, or when you're in a defensive position and there're lots of people around, and the fight is more than just you against an army -- you got a bunch of allies with you. But yeah, six.

And here's the thing: when we set off to make this game, we knew our number one thing was to capture that feeling of being in a great action-adventure genre movie that we all love when they come along, contemporize it, make you feel the same feelings you get when you watch them, and then put the controller in the player's hands. The number one thing is humanizing the hero. Not making a cardboard cutout that serves as your avatar in the video game space, but instead making him a living, breathing character with flaws and fears -- someone who can get hurt and all that kind of stuff. Not something you expect to see in a video game.

There's a deliberate reason he was in a t-shirt and jeans in Uncharted. In video games, that was unusual; that was weird. And he had hair. Even though people say, "That's such a generic characterization," I'd say, "Not in this medium. Generic would be space armor and a shaved head." The other thing is: watching a movie, you don't put the protagonist out there with no one to bounce off of. You have to tell a character-driven story to bring your audience in. Video games haven't traditionally done that; it's usually just the sole protagonist charging along. For one, it's hard to have allies on-screen be A.I. controlled and just have that work.

And also, it's a writing challenge; I think we've been a little bit immature in the creative writing of this industry to be honest. How you're supposed to tell a story that's not character-driven, that doesn't reflect off of other characters? I don't know. That's also where I think our wide demographic appeal comes from. Over and over again, we hear that it isn't just popular among the expected demographic -- girlfriends and wives and parents want to see the game. They want to play; they want play it in one sitting just to see what happens next. That's hugely gratifying for us to hear, because that tells us that we've done the character-driven story right. You're not just being propelled along by the visceral need to see what's next, but by the emotional need to see what happens next.

1UP: So have there been features or scenarios that were cut due to not "feeling in character?"

AH: There might be some weaponry that didn't feel "right."

EW: We definitely shied away from doing anything too gadgety or James Bond-like. Stuff that you'd expect to see in a spy thriller; we tried to make sure it stays in the action-adventure genre. Usually, everybody kind of "gets it" here -- not much gets brought up that needs to be shot down.

1UP: Except for that one guy quietly sobbing in the corner.

EW: Sure, like the guy who suggested anti-gravity boots.

AH: Every once in a while, something would come up and we'd go like, "that would be out-of-character or not appropriate for the franchise." Even with the possible cognitive dissonance of saying, "here's a guy who shoots at everything in front of him," there're still certain [lines]. We don't want him to be bloodthirsty -- we could easily go a lot further in terms of making everything gory. We try to keep everything to that "stunt" level of violence; a bit of a cartoony romantic veneer -- and when I say "romantic", I don't mean Cupid-and-hearts, I mean a little bit larger-than-life like when you're watching a stunt show and everyone goes flying in the air like in old Westerns. We try to keep that veneer on it. We don't want it to be like, "wow, that was graphic." It's a fine line that constantly moves and keeps us on our toes.

1UP: So, speaking of him being in t-shirt and jeans, who can claim credit for the whole "half-tuck" phenomenon?

AH: Tim Schafer coined that phrase, right? Because we all love it, and now everybody says "the half-tuck." Of course, credit goes to the character modeler, but I remember a conversation about how you never want your character to be symmetrical. So when you see that he's a guy in t-shirt and jeans, you go, "hmm, we'll have to have something on him to throw the symmetry off." So we have things like the fact that his sleeves aren't pulled up the same way on each arm, his holster was on one side, and his shirt half-tucked-in, to give him some asymmetry. We didn't know how awesome it would look. For this game, now Elena is rocking the half-tuck.

1UP: Moving on, we recently saw Gears of War 2 put out a deleted scene as DLC. Would you be interested in doing something similar?

AH: We don't really have deleted scenes; we have altered versions of some scenes that we'll probably include on the disc... [looking at Wells] if you allow us to.

EW: Are you thinking of [the main villain in Uncharted 2] in the...?

AH: Yes. But I mean we have lots of bonus material to include, as long as we can fit them onto the disc.

EW: We're bursting at the seams already.

AH: I didn't think we'd fill a Blu-ray disc, but we do and we did, and we're constantly fighting it now. But DLC is always a possibility.

EW: Yea, but with multiplayer now. We'll probably make DLC multiplayer-focused, but we haven't made a final decision yet.

AH: But we do have lots of outtakes and fun bloopers to include, if we have the room.

1UP: Wait, how long do you have to decide on those outtakes and extras? Shouldn't that be decided soon?

EW: We're actually pretty good at deciding things at the last minute. The bonuses and stuff you unlock is always something you put in the tail end, since the artists get freed up and can start to wrangle the assets. We have already planned more than we had in the last game. It really does just come down to disc space. And of course, you have to wait until the end to make that call, as game content comes first, and if space is tight, the extras are the first to go.

1UP: And you guys are doing a demo, correct?

EW: We have the multiplayer demo starting on September 15 as a two-week exclusive with GameStop initially. So that takes us to the end of September, and then the next two weeks leading up to our launch date -- October 13 -- it will be open to everybody.

1UP: So multiplayer demo, but no single-player one?

EW: Yeah, it's probably not looking like we're going to do one.

AH: It's always tough to do a single-player demo. You can always argue whether it benefits you or not in the long run, because so much of it depends on you understanding where you are in the narrative, and then appreciating what's going on in the single-player demo.

EW: Not to mention that it's a 12-15 hour experience and you have to somehow collapse that into 15 minutes. I mean, we have something like hundreds of moves to train you over several hours, and if you just drop somebody into the fire...

AH: It's hard to take a slice. But what's nice is that multiplayer actually gives you that, "if you're enjoying this gameplay, you're going to enjoy single-player gameplay," which is certainly a benefit that we didn't have last time.

EW: You certainly get to see the quality of the graphics and animation. So yea, the multiplayer demo is the only one we've got.

1UP: Hmm, it seems like it might be more intimidating to just drop a player into multiplayer though.

EW: Well, I think it's about different levels of expectation. Because in single-player, you want the story and the adventure, and you want to experience the narrative. If you're only taking a slice of that, you haven't developed the attachment to the characters; you haven't developed the motivations these characters have; all the stuff Amy was talking about. These are all critical parts of the experience; people just sit down [and finish the game] in one or two sittings because they get engrossed in the environment. If you just plunk any 15 minutes out of the game, it's not going to be the same.

AH: We sort of got that anecdotally from the first demo. Some people loved it; some people thought, "eh." I read over and over people saying, "Oh yeah, I played the demo and I didn't think much about it, but I bought the game and it's the best game ever and I love it to pieces." And, well, how do you solve that? A 15 minute slice just doesn't give you all that. I'd rather have people play the multiplayer, get the feel for the mechanics, and then look at the game, and think, "Yeah, I want to see the single-player experience." Yeah, I think we're giving people a lot of value for their money.

EW: The game is enormous; the first one just looks like child's play.

AH: It's a longer single-player experience.

EW: Significantly longer single-player. We've got competitive and cooperative multiplayer. We've got 90 minutes of cinematics compared to 50.

AH: It's literally a feature-length film, with fully-fleshed out multiplayer and co-op experiences. That's why we all look so tired.
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Read the whole thing in the link for some spoiler-ish details on locations and story stuff.
 
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I just read the post you on the previous page so it looks like it is pushed to September 15th. I should have read the thread.....as you were.
 
Demon's Souls right before my birthday and Uncharted shortly after!?! As Stewy from Family Guy once said, "I know what I'm getting."
 
Anybody try to see if the beta2 code is active? Just wondering if I can at least redeem the code now as opposed to waiting until later next month.
 
Ok, thanks. I must be OC 'cause it bothers me having codes lying around that I know will get me something, but I can't use. >_
 
This and Borderlands are the two games for me this year!
Uncharted to me was top 3 most fun games ever.
I cannot say best b/c too short but, most fun.
 
Yeah, Uncharted 2 is gonna dominate. I'm about to go get mine reserved some time soon possibly. I hope I'll have a chance to play it, since school is coming up >_>
 
[quote name='StoneCold316']Anyone hear anything about the multiplayer beta? Supposed to start today.[/QUOTE]

Its not a beta. Its for the multiplayer demo thats exclusive to Gamestop for a few weeks before it launches to all.

The beta is over. You got into that by purchasing Infamous.
 
As far as I'm concerned, this game is the reason to own a PS3, it's going to showcase exactly what PS3 can do. With the price dropping to $299, I really think this will prove there's no reason not to get a PS3.
 
Amazon just added release day delivery to the shipping options for Uncharted 2. It's free if you've got Amazon Prime.

[quote name='BoomHeadshot']As far as I'm concerned, this game is the reason to own a PS3, it's going to showcase exactly what PS3 can do. With the price dropping to $299, I really think this will prove there's no reason not to get a PS3.[/QUOTE]

The first Uncharted is the reason I bought a PS3, actually.
 
[quote name='bmachine']

The first Uncharted is the reason I bought a PS3, actually.[/QUOTE]

Me too. I was going to get a 360, to be honest, because of familiarity with titles, but I played Uncharted at Best Buy and had to get a PS3, because it was how I'd always wanted games to be since I started... great mo-cap, actually good voice acting, a great story, fun gameplay.

This'll even blow the first one out of the water, though.
 
Very very interesting article.

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/698746/Naughty-Dog-Says-Uncharted-2-Impossible-On-The-Xbox-360.html

"Again, quite the assertion. Yet as impressive as both of these details are, they seem to beg the rather obvious question: Does this game represent the pinnacle of the PS3’s potential? While Balestra's trumpeting of the PS3's power and his game's use of that power is understandable and clearly evidenced, it also sounds like he is saying that his developers have pushed the PS3 to its absolute limits, which I sincerely hope isn’t the case considering we’re only three years into the PS3’s "10-year life cycle.""

My guess is that they'll just go to dual layered Blu-rays for an extra 25gigs. Then when they fill that, they'll have some kind of tri-layered blu-ray by then.
 
[quote name='blader16']
My guess is that they'll just go to dual layered Blu-rays for an extra 25gigs. Then when they fill that, they'll have some kind of tri-layered blu-ray by then.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I was wondering why they didn't use a dual-layered blu-ray for the 50 GB space. I wish they'd put all the content the had to cut out and just have 2 discs (1 for multiplayer and 1 for single player). But I guess that would compromise what they're doing to link the single player and multiplayer experience.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/08/exploring-online-play-film-making-with-uncharted-2.ars

I liked the whole thing about how it will allow you to capture a video of your multiplayer experience and send it to your friends...
 
[quote name='jh6269']
I liked the whole thing about how it will allow you to capture a video of your multiplayer experience and send it to your friends...[/QUOTE]

Not even that, but over any background you want. Also loving how the lips move when you talk into the headset.
 
Uncharted 2 just had a 360% increase in pre-sales. This article talks about it. I'd wager it has a lot to do with some more people buying PS3s due to the price drop.
 
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[quote name='Invin']The date of that article says July 22nd..[/QUOTE]

Yeah the site had 2 articles with the same name, I fixed the link so it now goes to an article from yesterday.
 
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