Uncharted 2: Among Murderers

Hey everyone!

It's been a month since I last updated, I know. It was a busy month and I needed a bit of a break. I'm going to try to get back to my weekly schedule or at the very least get back to updating regularly.

While there's a lot that's been going on the past month I'm just going to take a minute to talk about the nature of the Triple A game, otherwise known as the Immaculately Conceived Murder Sim. The jumping off point: A little game from 2009 by Naughty Dog called Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.


Naughty Dog are the company that brought us Crash Bandicoot on the Playstation and the Jak and Daxter series on the Playstation 2. With the Playstation 3 they decided to up their game and shoot for more grown-up fare so they gave us the Uncharted series.

Uncharted is about a guy named Nathan Drake, descendent of Sir Francis Drake, who explores ruins with his pall Sully and looks for treasure to loot. He's not really in it for the money necessarily, he just likes the adventure of it.

And that's what it's all about, if you ask me. The adventure of it. The Uncharted games are pretty much the high point for so-called AAA, as in Triple A, game design. They are linear, directed experiences that tell a story "cinematically", i.e. with lots of well produced cutscenes and flashy scripted events. For what it is it's done really well. If you're trying to make a highly scripted, "cinematic" type game then Uncharted is the type of game you're looking to emulate.

The game is split up into unequal parts combat, platforming/puzzle solving and exploration in the form of finding secret spots that give you a bit of a treasure like an artifact from an ancient civilization you might find at an archaeological dig site. Mainly the game is a lot of shooting/punching dudes, with some platforming/puzzling as a breather and the treasure spots are scattered liberally throughout every level for the OCDs who can't help but comb through every square inch of virtual space.

Naughty Dog are perfectionists when it comes to making their games. Every element must fit and absolutely must be polished to a sheen. This perfectionism shows in their review scores. Their games consistently do well because they are committed to quality. If during development some element of the game is not fun or entertaining it gets rethought or just scrapped altogether. So when Naughty Dog commits themselves to doing a game that is basically Indiana Jones meets Tomb Raider then by god they're going to do just that. However, since it's a video game and video games have to be "fun" they end up doing Indy-meets-Tomb-Raider by way of a lot of finely tuned third person shooting.

The game is like Indiana Jones if Indiana Jones also happened to be a mass murderer. I mean, check it: In Uncharted Nathan Drake is always tracking down some lost treasure that's also important to some maniac with a private army for whatever reason (it turns out the reason is always because the games are, at their core, third person shooters) and as a result he is always getting into scrapes with all manner of armed thugs while tracking down each game's MacGuffin.

By "getting into scrapes" I of course mean Nathan Drake is readily taking up arms and blowing away mercenary dudes by the dozen. These guys aren't even ideologically driven, they're literally just in it for the money because some rich dude is paying them to guard his museum or whatever. Indiana Jones fought the fucking Nazis and all he ever did was just punch their lights out. I mean, yeah lots of Nazis died in those movies but it wasn't because Indiana Jones was popping out from behind cover every five seconds to put a bullet through their heads.

The problem I have with the combat in this game is that it keeps taking me out of the experience of being on an adventure with Nathan Drake. And Naughty Dog went to great pains to make these games about being on adventures with this guy. But at some point after I lose count of how many thousands of widows I've probably produced by now I start having trouble suspending my disbelief.

Even in the 1980s action movies that the Uncharted games draw inspiration from don't have the kinds of body counts these games have. I think the most an '80s Schwarzenegger flick produced was like 100 or 120, tops. Of course, video games aren't movies, right? So why not tell a story about a happy-go-lucky adventurer who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty with the occasional neck-snapping or whatever?

Frankly it's just bizarre. And I say this as someone who likes these games quite a bit! I'm nearing the end of Uncharted 2 and I'm already planning on running through it again (to find all the secret spots I missed) and experience the high points of its story again (there's a sequence where you have to fight your way up through a moving train that is really cool). At first I didn't much care for the combat because it felt so weightless, like I could tell all I was doing was just pushing a cursor around the screen and hitting a button when it reaches certain spots, but by this point I'm okay with it. There are parts where the designers give you the opportunity to sneak around and take enemies out with stealth but those parts never last too long before it's back to bog standard third person shooting.

What if they gave you the option to sneak around and reach the end of the level without killing anyone? Wouldn't it be cool to just have that as an option so if you don't really like the shooting you're not forced to endure so much of it to get on with the bits of the game you do enjoy? I really like the sections where you have to climb around a big area and figure out some environmental puzzle to move on, or the areas where it's all Big Cinematic Action Scenes the Video Game. But all the bits in between where you're running and gunning from one bit of cover to next, otherwise known as the whole foundation of the game? I could take or leave those, sad to say. I find myself trying to get through them as quickly as possible so the game can get interesting again.

Maybe my tastes are just changing as I'm getting older. Ten years ago I probably wouldn't have thought twice about how many people you have to kill in one of your average Triple As just to get on with the game. But these days I don't get a thrill from seeing virtual people die any more. It's not novel or interesting though it probably could be if some thought were put into it.

Most big studio Triple As are like this though. They're games about telling a story, or providing a unique experience or whatever, but it's almost always through the lens of killing lots and lots and lots of people. At this point it would be a bold and daring move for a big studio like Naughty Dog to try and make one of their "cinematic" story-experience games but keep the body count down to '80s-action-movie-levels. It would probably even be controversial among the target demographic these games sell to.

In the early 1990s when Doom came out anti-video game critics called it a "murder simulator" because you shot monsters and zombies with a shotgun. But that's basically what blockbuster games are now. Millions of dollars and man hours go into the production of lovingly rendering the most gruesome scenes conceivable. These murder sims are immaculate in their conception. No detail is left to the imagination, it's all right there for you to see and experience. It's almost as if big game studios are incapable or unwilling to try to do something different.

Which makes sense. This is what's selling and studios that produce and publish these games have to recoup the costs of development. Trying something different, like a game that's not about killing lots of people in lots of ways, might be seen as too risky to try. People, gamers, want action. They want blood, they want to thrill at the sight of it and the possibility of death. Violence is heavily ingrained into our culture, so ingrained that we don't even see it and when it's pointed out in blunt terms we're struck by the absurdity of it and driven to try and reject the reality that's in front of us.

We just like violence. Or, we've been sold on the idea of violence for so long we've forgotten that there are alternatives.

I know, I should stop picking on those poor Triple As what did they ever do to me, etc. However, I make no bones about it, I do enjoy me some pretty violent entertainment. I like blood and thrill at the sight of and possibility of death and so on. But even I can tell we're reaching a saturation point if we haven't gotten there already. Something's got to give and the Triple As constantly need to keep expanding their audiences to finance their next big game.

Naughty Dog's latest opus, The Last of Us, tackles the subject of violence in a much more mature manner. There's not as much killing, or at least not as much killing of people who aren't zombies, and the killing that's there is handled a lot better by the context of the story and the setting. Maybe it's just that games like Uncharted lack a decent context for all the mass murdering. The private armies you fight there are literally just obstacles for you to shoot through, there's no effort made like in The Last of Us to remind you that while they're the bad guys they're still people too with lives and thoughts and emotions etc.

Out of all the sneak-shooting and choking-to-death I did in The Last of Us I never broke the suspension of disbelief because everything that was happening in that game made sense at the time it was happening. I was doing bad things because I was in a bad place and had to make hard decision and so on. The context for all the murdering was there while it wasn't there in the Uncharted games. The Last of Us takes place in a gritty post-apocalyptic world where people are forced into making their own way by any means necessary. It's a totally different vibe than Uncharted.

Which isn't to say Uncharted isn't fun, whatever that word means. I certainly enjoy myself when I'm playing it, I just wish there was less shooting and more of everything else.

Thanks for reading.