Discover how Uncharted 2 Among Thieves will thaw out the action adventure genre with its blend of kinetic action setpieces, believable characterisation and movie-style dialogue.

Drakes’ Fortune was more than just a name. The game cost a sweet $20 million to make. The bottom line is, Uncharted Drake’s Fortune was a milestone game for Sony’s bedfellow developer Naughty Dog. It represented a new direction for the design team, away from cute animals towards real world scenarios; it was seen internally as Naughty Dog’s new franchise for a new generation of gamers and it marked the moment the developer flushed away its bespoke development tools in favour of the Industry standard C++ programming language, so that other Sony teams could use their assets and vice versa.

Uncharted Scored highly across the board and a million sales didn’t harm things – it was fortune and glory for Naughty Dog. But the developer isn’t resting on its laurels for the sequel, Uncharted 2 Among Thieves. Though the $20 million cost of the original title included creating the game from scratch, its sequel will cost roughly the same – despite using an identical engine and tools. Naughty Dog wants their special Uncharted 2 to be better in every respect.

Cinematic experience

For a start Uncharted 2 will remain resolutely single-player, the cinematic experience of the original that ensured it was as much fun the third or fourth time around is back in a big way. Actor Nolan North, who brought a rag-tag comedic side to the Nathan Drake character, has returned to voice the hero. He visits the sound studio three times a month to record vocals, often ad-libbing dialogue to pre-played footage that’s later added to the scene. It’s the same system that ensured the original Uncharted felt so filmic. When Drake grasped hold of the map from the crashed plane in the first game and ushered the immortal line, “Sweet!” it always felt more natural than the laboured expositional monologues of games like Metal Gear Solid 4.

The script for Uncharted 2 has been worked on for some time, through many rewrites. As with the twist in the last third of Uncharted when Drake stumbled from duelling with gun-toting pirates to fending off Nazi zombies in the bowls of a World War 2 submarine bunker, Naughty Dog is promising another similar foray into fantasy for the sequel. The idea for the Uncharted series is that it treads the same thin line between the fantastical and what can be proved scientifically. Those mutants crawling in the shadows were distant offspring of generations of people infected by the virus released when Sir Francis Drake originally opened the mummy’s coffin – or were they Nazi zombies? It all depends on your own unique take on the scenario.

The Cintamani Stone

So the new game will blend real world actuality with fantasy. Set three years after the events of Drake’s Fortune, while hunting for the treasures of the  court of Monogolian Emperor Kublai Kahn, lost with the final voyage of late 12^th century explorer Marco Polo, Drake stumbles onto a more valuable mystery – the key to Shangri-La and the wish-fulfilling Cintamani Stone. The gist is, the Cintamani Stone is rumoured to be a giant sapphire that magically grants the wishes of anyone who possesses it, and as giant sapphires go, it’s worth billions.