As many will testify, I love the Uncharted series and what it did for the PlayStation 3 was a testament to the development teams at Naughty Dog and their philosophy on creating and developing a story and the characters involved. Although all three Uncharted titles on the PlayStation 3 gave me some of the best gaming experiences on the previous generation of consoles, there are still improvements and ideas that I would love to see incorporated into Uncharted 4 on the new powerhouse of a console, the PlayStation 4.
Improved Shooting Mechanics
First off is something that many fans of the series had a gripe with and thats the shooting mechanics. In the first Uncharted game in the series, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, it worked ok and there wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong with it as such but due to the complex development architecture that the PS3 was, you could see why a few issues popped up now and then. Move on a few years later to Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and I personally feel that all the slight niggles had been ironed out and the shooting mechanics felt tight and for the most part, worked without any major frustrations. The mechanics within Among Thieves were the best so far in the series and when Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception was released, I had high hopes for the shooting mechanics in general, but unfortunately, there were issues.
This was mainly to do with the system for the mechanics getting a slight overhaul and in turn, there were issues that were not exactly ruining the game, but were frustrating at times. The biggest problem was the accuracy (or lack of it) during the shooting sections and the inability of the game recognising player inputs. Thankfully, these issues popped up rarely and even when they did it wasn’t a major concern, but they were there. Thankfully a patch did come later on which improved things dramatically, but we all know the saying – “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, right?
With Uncharted 4 being developed on much more powerful hardware on the PS4 and the UC4 development team having more to play with, I’m sure that the shooting mechanics will be improved drastically for the next iteration in the series. Im sure that Naughty Dog know that fans of the series had gripes with the shooting mechanics in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and will focus on improving this for Uncharted 4.
Dedicated Co-op
Something that I’ve always wanted to see in the Uncharted series is a dedicated Co-op mode for the main campaign because its immensely fun playing through the game on your own, but with a second player alongside you, the fun factor would be off the damn chart. Can you imagine having the chance to play alongside a human-controlled Sully or Elena? Now that would be awesome and if there was one team capable of making this an addition that would improve the game, its Naughty Dog.
Many gamers have been asking for this before Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception was officially unveiled to the world and I’m sure there has been some sort of discussion about including this in meetings at Naughty Dog HQ, but maybe due to the hardware constraints of the PlayStation 3 and how much was put into Uncharted 3, there just wasn’t enough room to include something like an additional co-op mode. With the PS4, comes more power under the hood and if Naughty Dog feel that it would help the franchise evolve, then I’m sure they would put it in and I for one would be very happy about that.
To read the rest of the article that I have written over at NDW please click here.
