20 Things You Didn't Know About Uncharted

2. Gears Of War Led To A Complete Overhaul Of Drake's Fortune

Gears Of War Mad World Trailer
Microsoft Game Studios

Changing Elena's hair colour wasn't the only tweak Naughty Dog made to Drake's Fortune as development progressed: in fact, at one point, they decided to overhaul the entire game.

Gears of War and Uncharted were two of the most important gaming franchises when it came to popularising cover-based, third-person shooters, but one of them had to come first, and in this case, it was Gears.

The first game in the Microsoft-exclusive series launched in November 2006, a whole year before Drake's Fortune hit PS3. The timing of this meant that Drake's Fortune was midway through development when Gears of War hit shelves, and as a result, Naughty Dog took some lessons from their rival game, and made their own game better.

“One of the cool things about Uncharted 1 is, we had no f***ing idea what we were doing", confessed former Naughty Dog developer Lucas Pope in a chat with Ars Technica. "Suddenly, Gears came out and showed them how to do it. So we changed everything, six months before release."

Naughty Dog had initially planned on giving Drake's Fortune a stiffer, Tomb Raider-esque camera and control system, but Gears convinced them to grease those joints and make Uncharted feel a lot more fluid.

And this monumental change to the game was implemented six months before it came out. Crikey.

In this post: 
Uncharted
 
First Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!