Uncharted had dynamic difficulty because it was too short and it had to slow the player down, says former designer

A developer who worked on the first Uncharted game says its dynamic difficulty scaling was added to artificially lengthen the game.

In an upcoming podcast interview with FRVR, Benson Russell – who was at Naughty Dog for nearly a decade and worked as a game designer on Uncharted 1-3 and The Last of Us – explained that Naughty Dog decided to “ditch all the old tech and rewrite all new stuff from scratch” when moving from PS2 to PS3 development .

“Well, that caused a lot of problems because systems came online way later than they should be,” Russell said. “So you have this issue of, they were still doing paper design… and artists were just making cool art because there was no gameplay.”

As a result, whereas future Uncharted games would have the story and game design created first and the environments were then built to fit that story, with the first Uncharted game the environments were ready first and the game was made to fit within those locations.

“We didn’t have a place for actual combat encounters but all this geo was made and we couldn’t go back and retrofit and make all new geo, so we had to find ways,” Russell recalled.

“When we were done, [it was] like: ‘This is a five hour game. We can’t charge 60 bucks for a five-hour game with no multiplayer, people are going to be pissed off.'”

Dynamic difficulty scaling was added to “slow the player down”

Russell explained that Naughty Dog’s solution to having a short game was to add dynamic difficulty scaling, where the game gets harder if the player is doing well.

Whereas dynamic scaling is often used in games to make sure the experience remains challenging for the player without being too easy or frustrating, in the case of Uncharted it was specifically designed to slow the player down.

As such, dynamic scaling in the first Uncharted was based on time rather than skill. If the player got through a certain part of the game within a certain time, the game became harder in an attempt to slow them down and make the game artificially longer as a result.

“We ended up putting a dynamic difficulty system in, but its key thing was to slow the player down if they were too good,” Russell said. “That’s one of the big ones. That’s one of the reasons why Uncharted 1 gets so hard.

“If you’re doing really good for the difficulty level you have it set on… it’s all time-based.  We would do a bunch of focus tests and we would grab the average times per encounter. If you beat a combat encounter faster than the average that we had, we would start cranking the difficulty.”

While the aim was originally to balance the difficulty, Russell conceded that “in the end, it was more geared toward just slowing you down from rushing through the game”.

Dynamic difficulty scaling remained in Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3, but because those games didn’t have an issue with their length, Russell said they acted more like players assume they do.

“Dynamic difficulty is in all three [games], but in the second and third ones it was tuned to match [you],” he said. “It wasn’t tuned to delay the game, or slow you down, it was tuned to match your skill level.”