During “Among Friends,” Richard Lemarchand’s Uncharted 2 postmortem at GDC 10, the co-lead designer admitted that the macro-design of the story and gameplay beats early on in production resulted in a mechanically exciting, but narratively lacking final act in the mythic city of Shambhala.
“There aren’t really enough strong story beats there to match the length and the intensity of the gameplay,” Lemarchand said. “At the end of the day, we’d committed too much to the level in terms of its final art and we couldn’t really bring about a perfect fit [between the story and the action].”
Maybe it was just the zombie Sasquatches and the final boss fight, but I’d tend to agree that Uncharted 2‘s final act was the weakest part of the story. Either way, it’s always groovy to hear a designer with the honesty to criticize his own game.
UPDATE: SCEA’s PR department contacted us and requested that we clarify Lemarchand’s statement. Lemarchand did not specifically say that Uncharted 2‘s story “lags” in the final act, but that, in PR manager Jill Webber’s words, “that he felt the Monastery level was where they didn’t have quite enough story beats.”
