Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception Catch-All

I just finished it up tonight, sticking on normal until the end. The characters, story, acting, setpieces and the thrill ride as a whole were outstanding. Like many others, I think the combat was absolutely abysmal, even against previous Uncharted games. The controls were worse, the enemies were cheap and too large in number and the stealth sections were ridiculous because due to the omniscient enemy AI, you would always blow your cover if you did them in any way but the one way Naughty Dog wanted you to. There's simply no excuse for combat design this bad after 3 games. I also thought the puzzles were cool but too often relied on dumb luck to figure out the solutions. Several had no obvious indications from what Drake had in his journal. The combat would have ruined the game for me if all the rest of it wasn't so awesome. I also found Mystic Violet in the credits. I'd still really like to do the co-op missions at some point if people want to try them out.

I finished the game last week and I would say that Uncharted 3 is my least favorite, (while still being very good,) of the series. Most of it seems to be coming from the controls for me. I had few issues with Uncharted 1 from a control perspective, but in 3 I had quite a few moments where I became quite frustrated because the aiming just doesn't work the same way as 1 and 2.

I haven't read the entire thread but from what I've heard from the podcast and what I've seen in the thread it does seem like a number of people share my disliking of the controls. I also didn't really care for the story until about half way. The entire first half just felt like I was spinning my wheels without actually going anywhere.

I've seen other discussions about "plot holes" around the internet and I just don't see them. There's only one thread from the game that I don't think was resolved in any satisfying fashion. Some of it may be coming from not watching every scene carefully to make sure I didn't miss anything, or it might not make complete sense with the information given to the player.

Spoiler:

Talbot is the thread I am referring to. He disappears into thin air on a number of occasions, although it may only happen when the observer is under the influence of the hallucinogen, which is why I need to play the game again. Talbot could have also used a predetermined location where he had a lift or rope to climb up in case he needed to.

Talbot is shot by Cutter while everyone is watching and he seems to be completely unaffected by it. Talbot could be wearing a bulletproof vest, which is a perfectly reasonable explanation if it were to actually be revealed at a later point. I say this because I can't remember a single movie or video game where someone wearing a bulletproof vest doesn't reveal it at some point.

I know that he is supposed to be mysterious, and he very much is. There is little to no information about him throughout the game. He likes to use deception and misdirection frequently, and his death scene doesn't really show confirmation of death.

I don't know if there are plans for another sequel in the Uncharted series, but Talbot could be an awesome enemy to explore further considering that he would have a large bone to pick with Sully and Drake.

Going to (I think, unless it's significantly longer than I imagine) finish up tonight. Need to "clear the decks" before I can feel not guilty about buying Skyrim.

Two items I would like to discuss
Supernatural events in Uncharted 3

Spoiler:

or the complete lack there of. In the previous two games, Drake is always looking for a lost forgotten treasure, city, power or something. The first uncharted reveals a power that turns humans into zombie-like creatures. Uncharted two had a lost city plus ape-like residents in shangra-la (spelling).
Where is U3 supernatural force? Uncharted 3 had demon soldiers who turned to be perfectly normal soldiers while Drake was tripping on the city's water supply.
If the supernatural force was the djinn that Drake and Sully shoot towards the end of the game, it was terribly unclimatic when compared with the previous two games.

Second order of business;
Who is Cutter and where does he come from? Does he appear in previous games?

Hobbes2099 wrote:

Who is Cutter and where does he come from? Does he appear in previous games?

Chloe's new boyfriend as far as I could tell.

Stele wrote:
Hobbes2099 wrote:

Who is Cutter and where does he come from? Does he appear in previous games?

Chloe's new boyfriend as far as I could tell. :?

So this is his first appearance in the series? It comes off as if he was a recurring character. Even Elen asks about him as if she knew him when she first appears in U3.

All spoilers all the time in this post!

Spoiler:

With regards to the way the supernatural element was handled in the third one, I really liked that it was all Nate concocting it all. In the past I've noticed a number of folks that were really unhappy with the yeti guardians from 2, so this seemed like a creative twist on an element everyone was otherwise expecting. What's the surprise magical creature in this game? Ho snap, it's all Nate high on goofballs.

Re: Talbot and his getting shot, Ms Hennig actually answered this via someone on Twitter. What a super lady. Interesting to read her take on it; I was wondering about it too.

http://forums.naughtydog.com/t5/Gene...

So I'm done with the single player. Impressions:

Spoiler:

+ Rational explanation for the supernatural stuff
+ No ridiculous boss fight
- Missed the lack of any banter between Chloe & Elena, probably could have done with more banter overall.
- The aiming, probably, if I had bothered to play it on anything other than very easy, but I didn't =D

dc_juv3nal on PSN if peoples want to add me to have a go at the coop adventure mode stuff.

Just finished it up. Agree with most people in the thread re: difficulty, combat, and aiming. BUT...

Still an amazing ride and story. I love those characters so much. Not sure if the ending was as good as U2 (also the ending sequence:

Spoiler:

hmm collapsing ancient city...think I've seen that before somewhere

) but it was definitely emotionally affecting.

Thumbs up.

It seems to me that you're given a lot less freedom in how you tackle encounters here than you are given in Uncharted 2. In Uncharted 2 they seemed to give you the drop on combat situations more frequently, meaning that you could choose how and from what direction to approach it, and there seemed to be more verticality in the combat (even though this one adds the situational and slightly useless drop takedown.)
I was pretty often mercilessly pinned behind cover in this game and didn't see any opportunity that "oh, I could clamber over here or manoeuvre around to this piece of cover somehow midfight. Sure, there's a bit of that in Chapter 19, but that really was all over Uncharted 2 (although maybe you did have to look for it!)

Basically, what got me thinking about this was that in U2 I did a challenge run on Crushing where I used only my fists and grenades throughout the game (aside from on bosses and 'natives', and it was hard but due to the open nature of a lot of the combat encounters (and perhaps a few other variables like the slower enemies,) it was doable. I wanted to do the same run in Uncharted 3, but I can't even imagine myself doing so, because there are so many areas where the game basically tells you what weapon to use and how to approach a situation.

Like when you get your foot trapped and have to shoot the two guys in the Chateau, or on the aeroplane when four men stand across the fire from you and there seems to be no way to actually approach them to melee, or the need to use RPGs at prescribed moments throughout the last half of the game. Not only that, but so much of the game feels more like a corridor in the fight scenes than even the train in Uncharted 2 managed to be! The train was actually mechanically really open, each carriage had four paths through it (left, right, through, over) and you could switch between all four pretty effectively at any moment including getting the drop on people as you did so,) whereas in Uncharted 3 a lot of the game, particularly later, felt like "go down this corridor, and face the challenge of X amount of snipers/RPG guys, X amount of mid range guys and X amount of big beefy shotgun/riot shield guys" whilst taking cover behind THIS wall. Repeat.

I know there were still several pretty open combat areas (in the Chateau, Yemen, the airport and arguably in

Spoiler:

the sandstorm, and Ubar

but I came out of this experience feeling that I had much less choice (or even, player agency!) in the combat.

But yeah, the story was probably slightly better, and I had a pretty good time.

On the subject of being fatally shot:

Spoiler:

How many times have characters in this game been mortally wounded and then you find out they're completely fine? Seems like a lot. It happened at least four times this game.

Just got my USB headset from Amazon. I'm down for co-op sometime in the evening this week or next if anyone is interested in scheduling something.

Even though it had some great cinematic moments, for the most part I felt the game was a let-down compared to Uncharted 2. I absolutely dreaded the shooting portions - everything just felt off, from aiming at the enemies to sliding to the correct piece of cover. And I'm not a fan of the dual-shock to begin with, so that didn't help. The hand to hand Batman fighting rip-off.. er.. homage made the fist fights fun at least.

Still, I love the characters and their banter, and I'm sold on the series until it completely jumps the shark. Here's hoping they can capture some of the magic of UC2 back for UC4!

The controls have been patched!

Oh maybe I can finish now. Quit on Ch21 or something, very close to the end.

And they also added the story movie gallery to the campaign menu, just like the previous two games had. Hell them leaving that out caused quite a fight with my wife and I. Played some of the game without her, and was like here I'll show you the scenes you missed... and there was no gallery!

Pretty big omission for a game built around the story.

Anyway, I dabbled into ch 22 or so last night.

Surprise!

Spoiler:

Sully isn't dead.

Still I got to another room that just annoyed me enough to take a break. Walk in and there's 2 guys in front of you. So I hit cover, and start fighting. All the sudden I'm hit by a grenade launcher and dead. So I go in, get in cover, look around... oh there's a guy way off to the left on a bridge shooting a grenade launcher at me. And then before I can shoot him, I'm dead. So I go in again... shoot him... don't kill him... he shoots a grenade... I finish him... I blow up. Finally the 5th time I kill him and don't die to a grenade. Then some big guy with a shotgun and helmet has been advancing on me. And he kills me.

It's like they're just f*cking with you. There's no way you can get through some of these rooms on the first try without knowing enemy placement. Just annoying.

Anyone still playing this game? Friend me up. I've decided to dive into multiplayer and I'm loving it (more specifically the co-op arena). Thoughts on U2 vs U3 MP?

I watched a friend play through most of this and enjoyed it. The one question I had:

Spoiler:

What the hell is up with those spiders?

Tyrian wrote:

I watched a friend play through most of this and enjoyed it. The one question I had:

Spoiler:

What the hell is up with those spiders?

It was originally a concept for the original Uncharted. It was later moved to U3.
That's my guess, but if you check the concept art of Uncharted it has

Spoiler:

spiders

Played the whole thing post aiming patch so I don't know which aiming mode was the original (I switched to alternative in the settings, whatever the first one was was terrible, and then it felt great). After about nine chapters bumped it up from to hard and then it got good. The shipyard was really tough, but I felt like I was learning a little bit each time I died. Naughty Dog really needs to limit the number of commands it assigns to the 〇 key, however. Overall felt they ramped up the gameplay complexity in a good way, but that the story just wasn't that compelling.

Spoiler:

What were they trying to say about Drake by having his cohorts question why he was going after this treasure when it was putting Sully's life at risk, and then suddenly dropping that whole thread? It seemed like they wanted to take the story someplace darker than they had in the past, but got cold feet--hey Sully's alive after all, blah blah blah. Would have loved to see Drake get some sort of comeuppance for caring too much about the treasure he was after, and not enough about the people helping him.

Also, and maybe this is just me living in China too long, but everyone's eyes looked really weird to me. Drake's especially, like he's half Asian.

Oh wow. I didn't realize there was an aiming patch. I literally just started this and thought the aiming sucked. After seeing in here I looked and tried the new aiming and I think I'll survive now. Yay!

I finished this not too long ago. I think I'm starting to agree more and more with Tom Chick on this series. While most of the set pieces were great, and the voice acting, graphics, and animation were all outstanding, I felt like the story and shooting were the weakest of the series. For a game that is so rigidly linear there needs to be something pulling me through. This was such a convoluted mess of a story I was often asking myself, "why am I doing this again?" It led to me taking several long breaks from the game. I just wasn't interested in picking back up and continuing the journey.

As unfathomable as the story was in the first Uncharted, at least it seemed cohesive and focused. You wanted to find out what that sub was doing in the jungle. You wanted to keep going deeper because you knew what you were after: El Dorado. For the life of me a I couldn't figure out what the writers were thinking having me jump around an old cruise ship or fighting in an old chateau, other than being plot contrivances to vary the scenery. And speaking of contrived, there were some moments that just made me sigh, like happening to wash up on the beach in front of a certain someone's house. They tried to pack too much in. I wasn't even that keen on the globetrotting in Uncharted 2 because I thought it convoluted the story, and I think it felt worse in 3.

Most of this could have been excusable if the core gameplay mechanic was solid. In Uncharted 1, I excused the shooting because I enjoyed the story, characters, and setpieces. Now that I've lost the story, it's a lot tougher to excuse. The enemies still take way too many shots to bring down sans headshot, which seems to be a lazy means of heightening the challenge. Some of the setups just felt cheap, where you would basically get killed or boxed in unless you knew what was coming. Really kills the flow of the game having to play the same combat segment two or three times before figuring out where you're supposed to go.

I'd mention the puzzles, but they were so easy in this title they aren't even worth a thought.

From a technological standpoint, this game is a marvel. And the character acting at least gives the illusion that there's a compelling story. But there's not, unfortunately. Perhaps if I would have played the game in one sitting I would have had a better grasp on what was going on. But, like most I suspect, I take it in one or two chapter bits each play session, which leads to a completely disjointed experience.

Uncharted 1 remains my favorite in the series and I doubt I'll pick up Uncharted 3 again.

Evo wrote:

I finished this not too long ago. I think I'm starting to agree more and more with Tom Chick on this series. While most of the set pieces were great, and the voice acting, graphics, and animation were all outstanding, I felt like the story and shooting were the weakest of the series. For a game that is so rigidly linear there needs to be something pulling me through. This was such a convoluted mess of a story I was often asking myself, "why am I doing this again?" It led to me taking several long breaks from the game. I just wasn't interested in picking back up and continuing the journey.

While I agree on some level with you I still have to disagree on some specific parts.

I think the biggest problem for UC3 is, that from my POV the series has made a major jump forward from UC1 to UC2, and it was impossible for UC3 to live up to the expectations caused by the history of the series so far.
While UC1 was an okay-ish cover based shooter that I pretty much enjoyed, UC2 introduced that "major blockbuster feeling" kind of gameplay. I can still remember the first few hours of my first run in UC2. I literally went "whoa!", "oh sh*****t", etc all the time. I was completely emerged and dazzled, and it felt like for the first time an action game hit exactly my buttons, all the time. Combined with a good story in UC2 and exotic beautiful locations this for me was a perfect 10.5 (sic!).

Now the downside of this is, that gameplay wise it's still a cover based shooter. Well executed yes, but nothing more. And even more important - the blockbuster aspect works on the moment of surprise and on heavy scripting. Both don't work well on replays or (and here we come to the point) sequels. So my point about UC3 is, that while it adds an additional layer of "polish", it does not really evolve the series. Also the blockbuster stuff tends to get old. I have 3 playthroughs on UC2, plus some additional chapter runs for getting the last treasures and trophies. With that amount of experience, I was pretty much able to foresee must of the scripted events in UC3.
In UC3's world must of the buildings are very fragile and tend to break down just the moment Nate passes by...

OK, so much for old tricks. Now concerning that ship... totally blew me out of the water what they did THERE. But see, the funny part is, the stunt they pulled of in those specific chapters was all NEW. Hence it works.

The story telling I have to pretty much agree with you. The story in UC3 seems unfocussed, and the (yet un)mentioned plotholes (especially that "shore" scene) also took away some of the enjoyment. I think it was Lara on the podcast who recently said, that the story had so much potential with Nate's motivation being questioned by very dearest friends. There were strong moments in their, but ultimately the end somewhat seemed rushed and story wise more things were left unsaid then they were explained/told.

OK, long post - but my verdict is overall UC3 is a very good game, but if they should decide to do an UC4 (which I would except ND to), then they better rethink the blockbuster stuff (maybe dial it back a notch?), and also they need to work on the story telling. Inconclusive scripts are really hurting in linear games like UC.

I just finished Uncharted 3 last night, and I basically agree. Everything was great except for the actual game. It wasn't that the gameplay is bad, as it's exactly like the previous Uncharted games with the addition of a simplified Batman-style face-punching system. I also found the puzzles to be just as good in this one as in the past games. I didn't find I needed to rely on trial-and-error at all, but I digress.

Actually found the shooty-bang-bang just as fun as past Uncharted games most of the time, too, but I probably died about 30 times throughout because the controls just wouldn't do what I wanted. I'd move the stick right and jump, Drake would jump to the left and die. Once, while hanging, holding the L1 button wouldn't make Drake aim. Letting go would make him aim for a split-second, so I would press L1 again and nothing would happen until I let go. That got me killed. And on several occasions, the controls simply stopped working in the middle of a fight. I'd be punching a dude and suddenly Drake would decide to just stand there and get shot to death.

I know it's not the controller, as I have two of them and it happened with both of them whether they were plugged in directly or not. I haven't had any of these issues with the multiplayer, though. Controls have been smooth as hell in multiplayer.

There were also a number of bugs that really hurt the experience for me. At one point, the dialogue simply dropped out of a cutscene. Moving lips, no words. I had to restart from the last checkpoint. Thankfully, the game has a great checkpoint system so it was literally only 30 seconds before the cutscene.

Speaking of saving, I ended up having to manually save to two save files every time I wanted to stop playing because whenever I started up the game again, the first save file had always mysteriously reverted about a half hour back into the previous chapter.

Oh, and the stealth isn't very good. Although, thankfully, the game never forces you to rely on stealth. I'd usually try the stealthy approach as much as possible, but all but one time (in the castle) I'd be found and then a lot of shooting would happen. I actually kind of liked that because Drake's kind of a bumbling idiot (and a fat-ass. Seriously, everything he stands on, lands on, or hangs from breaks) so it made sense that his stealthy approach would invariably fail, and rather than punishing you, the game rewards you with testicles to shoot.

Overall, though, I think I'd rank Uncharted 3 right alongside Uncharted 2. Some stuff is better (multiplayer, a lot more Sully), some stuff is worse (controls and at-times rampant bugginess), but overall I think I enjoyed it just as much. Plus, I actually like the multiplayer, which is really rare for me (I didn't even like Uncharted 2's multiplayer that much) so I'm pretty happy with it. 8/10.

I, too, am up for co-op missions.

Finished it! I loved it and didn't have the Uncharted fatigue that a lot of people seemed to have. I think that's because I waited a little longer to start it, and I rarely play console games.

LTTP here. I've only just begun, but it's so nice to go seamlessly from cut scenes to action. Without any load times, the story just keeps propelling you forward.

Very late to the party but I just picked this up. Looking forward to the campaign and playing around online. Anyone up for some co-op? Go ahead and add me: RobotMarmot on PSN.

Also, can a typical cellphone bluetooth headset work as a PSN mic? If not, I don't have a mic.

I will do the coop with you.

Trashie wrote:

Also, can a typical cellphone bluetooth headset work as a PSN mic? If not, I don't have a mic.

Yes, you can pair just about any bluetooth headset in the Settings menu of the XMB. Here's a video on how to do it.

Yeah my little Samsung earpiece is synced with my phone and my PS3.