Uncharted 2's train level is one of the iconic moments in the game, but according to Naughty Dog, it was also one of the most complicated to make, causing much stress amongst the development team.

Calling fully-movable and transformable set pieces like Uncharted 2's train and hotel levels the "holy grail" of action games, Naughty Dog's Co-Lead Designer says that the team's decision to incorporate such elements into Uncharted 2 was both the reason for the game's phenomenal success and the straw that almost broke the game's - and the company's - back.

Naughty Dog calls the result their "Dynamic Object Traversal System," and it's what makes it possible to conduct a running gunfight across the top of a moving train, for example, or duck and roll through an open window while the hotel you're standing inside of comes crashing down around you - both levels that Naughty Dog dreamed up very early in the game's production cycle, and what Lemarchand calls "a handful of ideas that [were] simply too good to not include in the game."
Lemarchand warns developers who might be inclined to follow in Naughty Dog's footsteps that such levels are "amazingly complicated."

"The only way that we were able to tackle it was to regard it as a very serious problem that we simply couldn't let slide. ... In the Spring of 2009 ... we realized just how big of a game we had bitten off and ... we were either going to have to chew extra hard or make some cuts or choke."

The next several months leading up to Uncharted 2's launch, says Lemarchand, were among the worst he and the rest of the team had ever experienced as game designers, surpassing even the most brutal crunch periods any of them could remember. He admitted that the stress was ultimately self-deating, causing further stress, illness and reduced productivity, but he offers that they simply had no choice.

Miss Razz via escapistmagazine.com »