Yesterday, on the first public day of Comic-Con International in San Diego, Naughty Dog introduced a brand-new co-op mode for Uncharted 2 called "Gold Rush." It's playable at kiosks in the Sony booth on the show floor, though I imagine that you'll be waiting in line for a while if you want to try it out.

In the video below the fold, Naughty Dog PR man Arne Meyer explains how Gold Rush works. You can see it for yourself, too, since the video includes off-screen gameplay footage from a match in the "Plaza" map (yep, that's the one that was available for play in the first multiplayer beta).

Gold Rush has a team of human players joining together to face off against the computer. There's a treasure that pops up in a random place on the map, and the idea is to go grab it and bring it to a treasure chest (which seems to be at a fixed location). It appears that the CPU is trying to prevent the human team from "capturing" the treasure; at the end of each round, the treasure's location will change.

After spending some time with the beta last month, and seeing this new mode, it's obvious to me that nothing about the multiplayer portion of Uncharted 2 is "tacked on." Naughty Dog is serious about multiplayer, and it truly seems like they're bringing their 'A' game with both the multi- and single-player parts of the game.

If you happen to be at SDCC, check out the Uncharted 2 kiosks, because you'll get a voucher for a Navarro skin (he was in the original Uncharted) that can be used in the sequel's multiplayer mode. The wait from now until October 13th seems interminable...

[Via PlayStation.Blog]