18 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About The Uncharted Series

9. Uncharted Changed How Naughty Dog Animates Their Games

Before Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, all of Naughty Dog’s game animations were key framed; a method in which characters are brought to life manually, frame by frame. This method worked for their previous games, which were cartoony and colorful. But because Uncharted was meant to feel more realistic and mature, a different approach was needed.

The decision was made to implement motion capture, which puts real actors in mo-cap suits and digitally records their actions for later use. This allowed for more nuanced and naturalistic movements of the characters while also saving valuable animation time. It also had the added benefit of letting the actors perform with each other in real time, which added to the chemistry and gave the characters more grounded personalities.

Motion capture proved so successful that Naughty Dog continued using it in all the following Uncharted games, as well as The Last of Us.