Judging by the threads recently we’re sure you’ll be interested by this interview with Richard Lemarchand of Naughty Dog. He spoke to us about Uncharted and trophies, and gave us his opinion on what the future holds for the PS3 gaming experience…
Trophies are coming to the PlayStation Network: at last, we’ll be properly rewarded, with virtual silverware, for our stunningly impressive, hard-won in-game achievements. In fact, when we say that Trophies are coming, that isn’t strictly correct: they have arrived, thanks to the latest PS3 firmware update, which adds support for them, accessible via the Cross-Media Bar which, of course, we can now open in the middle of playing a game.
If you want to find out what the Trophy system is like, you can: by replaying Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune which, of course, had its own Medals system for rewarding achievements. As ever, on your behalf, we went straight to the horse’s mouth, in the form of Richard Lemarchand, Co-Lead Game Designer at Uncharted developer Naughty Dog, who was making a rare visit to his native Britain for his summer holidays.
Lemarchand explains the background to Uncharted’s retro-fitted support for Trophies: “While we were finishing Uncharted, we were already thinking ahead to some kind of Trophy system for the PlayStation Network, so we created the Medal system, where players could win Medals for making certain amazing accomplishments in the game: whether it was getting three enemies with a single grenade, or stealth-killing five dudes from behind, and so on.”
“So when the Cross Media Bar Trophy system was announced and we got the development code for it, it was super-easy for us to dovetail our Medal system with the Trophy system. And before we knew it, we had it working.”
Lemarchand pulled out some screenshots to demonstrate: “This is our medal system in Uncharted, so he has just killed three enemies with one grenade. He gets the Dyn-O-Might Medal. We hooked it up so that a few seconds after you get the Medal, you get the Trophy notification. In order to get this, you have to download the patch, so you go to the PSN site and Patch/Uncharted. Then you can win Trophies for any Medal that you haven’t yet unlocked.”
“Once you’ve won a Trophy, you can just bring up the XMB by pressing the PlayStation button, and it pauses the game. Then it overlays, and you can go down into your Uncharted group and see all the Trophies that you’ve won as well as the ones you haven’t unlocked yet. Although some of those are secret, and you won’t see them until you’ve unlocked them. This stuff, of course, is viewable in-game – just like you can, for example, play music in-game. You can go further into the Trophies and study the detail and, of course, you can view them all from the main screen of the PS3.”
Lemarchand reckons this adds replay value to Uncharted: “I think it will be a good reason for people to play the game through again, which was one of our primary goals for creating the Medals system in the first place. I think because of the way Uncharted is structured, with those reveals and surprises, the story is pleasurable in a different way the second time through – in the way that a movie like Memento is, because once you know the surprises, you can have a different appreciation of the story. Going and finding every last bit of treasure, and making sure that you get lots of kills with every different weapon and earning all those Trophies is a great way for people to explore Nathan Drake’s world and get in touch with the richness of it.”
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to convert your existing Uncharted Medals into Trophies, though, as Lemarchand explains: “We didn’t want to lock the Uncharted save-game: we wanted to make it so you could copy it onto a Memory Stick, take it around to your mate’s house and show him where you had got to. That meant that we had to make it so that you had to start a new game if you wanted to get all the Trophies, otherwise we’d have opened ourselves up to cheating, people copying save-games and so on. We do have a system in our new-game system: when you start a new game from the very beginning, you can bring over any Medals that you’ve got. Which means you could start over, you’d keep your personal progress, and you’d get to unlock the Trophies at the high end of the spectrum. So people would see that you were getting the whole set in the game.”
Naturally, the Trophy system will really come into its own when PlayStation Home is up and running, and we all get Trophy rooms, around which we can wander, marvelling at our sheer gaming brilliance. Sadly, Lemarchand can’t talk about Home, though. So we asked him about future iterations of Uncharted: “I can’t talk about that: our current project is still unannounced. We are very hard at work: we’re quite a way into our next production cycle now. It’s great having all of the Uncharted code and tools, but we haven’t announced anything yet. I think all the horrible things that Nate Drake alludes to — which the South Seas pirates get up to with their prisoners — will be inflicted on me when I get back to the office if I spill the beans.” Unspecific, perhaps, but it sounds highly promising.
Lemarchand can talk about another interesting subject, though: the prospect that, in the near future, multi-platform PS3 games will outshine the versions running on rival consoles: “There’s a set of tools called Edge that were developed on the Naughty Dog premises, actually, by a group of very, very senior games programmer, some from Naughty Dog and some from elsewhere. I think it’s tremendously visionary of Sony to make these tools, which are largely low-level libraries.”
Before proceeding, we need to explain a little of the unique manner in which the PS3’s much-admired, phenomenally powerful Cell processor works. Essentially, it contains eight mini-processors called Synergistic Processor Units (SPUs), six of which can be given tasks to perform at any given time. Lemarchand continues: “It’s code that runs on SPUs, and it’s to do with things like animation compression, generalised compression and rendering optimisations. These guys are really old-school programmers: guys who are always looking to shave another cycle off an operation. And part of the skill of developing for the PlayStation 3 is getting the GPU to farm jobs out to the six SPUs – seeing which SPUs are idling and can take up some of the slack in a frame-to-frame kind of way.”
Here, Lemarchand comes up with an interesting revelation: “That’s why we think we’re probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there’s this great, untapped potential. All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years.”
Lemarchand also waxes lyrical about the culture of cooperation that exists between first-party Sony Studios: “We have this culture of open communication: we like to trade stories about what we found were ways of doing things that worked, and what didn’t. We’re always trading war-stories with Insomniac and Evolution and Sucker Punch. We’re just one block away from Sony Santa Monica – the guys who made God Of War – and we get our designers together with theirs for formal lunches, and just talk about tools, design approaches and so on. So there’s this town square feeling of everybody trading stories about our best practices, and I think it makes everybody stronger and smarter.”
Steve Boxer
Havent seen this around :)
Nice to see how the Playstation Studios work together :)
What do you guys think about the him saying that Uncharted only uses 30-40 % of the PS3's power ?
I think he's exaggerating a bit too much ;)
Discuss
