Interview | Keith Guerrette, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is already whipping up serious game of the year buzz amidst a raft of serious competitors this blockbuster season. The game’s lead effects artist, Keith Guerette, took some time to talk to Gamefreaks about the road to Nathan Drake’s biggest adventure yet.

In an industry ever hungry for sequels success can be a double-edged sword, once you hit the right note fans will expect the inevitable follow-up to sing even louder. For the modest Naughty Dog visual effects artist, caught off guard by the success of Uncharted 2, the heat was on.

“We just went huge with our ambitions, our goals and what we were trying to do, one of the biggest challenges has been trying to reel it in to make it fit within the two year development period.”

It helped that the studio rolled straight out of the second game into the third. The work behind the standout levels of Uncharted 2, such as the train sequence and collapsing building, took most of the development period to perfect. By the time the game shipped the technology was working but the team hadn’t had much of a chance to really push it.

“So from the start we knew we had this awesome wealth of toolsets to sit down and make epic set pieces. We threw around ‘epic’ jokingly all the time, ‘more epic!’

“We sat down with a whiteboard and just said ‘OK, what are the craziest things we can put Nathan Drake through? How about an airplane that explodes while you’re in it, flying though the air? How about a cruise ship that sinks into a stormy ocean while you’re inside of it and then splits in half? How about a mansion that burns down…’

“We basically just sat down and tried to come up with all these massive cool set pieces while at the same time trying to whittle out the story.”

That might not sound like the approach of a development team that emphasises the art of storytelling but anyone familiar with the series knows that the pulpy narrative always takes centre stage; or as Guerette puts it, ‘we are storytellers first, game developers second’. With Drake’s Deception Naughty Dog again delved into history for inspiration, this time casting an eye to the  Arabian Peninsula.

“Lawrence of Arabia travelled across Europe and the Middle East trying to find, amongst many things, the Iram of the Pillars or the Atlantis of the Sands, this fable city cast away by God because of its arrogance into the Rub’ al Khali desert. We hadn’t taken Drake into desert environments yet so it fit really well for us but also along the journeys of Lawrence Araia there’s a lot of mystery, a lot of intrigue, there’s big sections of his travels he didn’t write in his journals so nobody knows what he did, what he found or even why he went to certain places.

“Tying in to the earlier games we realised one of the areas he travelled was also fabled to have been travelled by Sir Frances Drake and again he left out eight months where we know he was in the peninsula near the Rub’ al Khali desert but nobody knew what he was doing there… we just kind of took off running when we found that.”

As those fortunate enough to have played the game already know, the third instalment also focus heavily on Nathan Drake and mentor Victor Sullivan’s shared history. In order to flesh out the relationship in an authentic way the studio had to concentrate on conveying emotion in a believable manner, from the story through to the minute details of production design.

For Guerette that meant pulling inspiration from previous gaming successes, new and old, starting with 1995 RPG classic Chrono Trigger.

“I remembered playing it as a kid and I though ‘I’m going to go back and play this,’ so I pulled out my old Super Nintendo and I really enjoyed it. It reassured me once again that, despite all the sales and marketing pitches about graphics, it’s not really about graphics.

“Those games were really, really enjoyable and I had a really fun, strong emotional connection with these characters that are little 8-bit cubes running around.

“That’s something I’m happily seeing the industry shift towards; a lot of other studios are taking advantage of this generation of consoles to give a really cool emotional presentation. I feel like it’s a good time in the industry for a lot of actual art to come out as opposed to just a bunch of shooting games.”

The effects artist points to the PlayStation 3’s ambitious ‘interactive psychological thriller’ Heavy Rain as one of the boldest examples of this trend.

“I’m a huge fan of games that are able to convey emotion, that make you feel something. And usually it’s excitement, there’re a lot of action games out there, but if I actually feel emotion then I’m stoked about it. Heavy Rain is one of the few games that I’ve actually felt sad about, there’s just such an emotional rollercoaster that it is one of my favourite games.

“At the same time that style of game is so unique it’s not something that’s successful for everyone, it’s not a type of experience that everybody is going to enjoy. For me, I really appreciate what they did, I loved it, but I had to let go of the fact that it’s a lot less of a game and more of an interactive movie.”

The critics seem to be in agreement that Naughty Dog has managed to find a happy medium between the emotionally charge of an interactive movie and frenetic action of an adventure game. Knitting together narrative intrigue, swashbuckling action, incendiary set pieces and intricate environments the team has put together Drake’s most accomplished adventure to date. So we can we expect to see the bar raised again?

“We don’t know, in all honesty we just finished the game a few weeks ago and took off on vacation.  The one thing I can say is that we are reluctant to just sit down and make another game because it’s not an easy process and we wan to be sure it’s something that’s going to be worth the amount of energy we put into it and worth your time to play.”