Naughty Dog Wanted to Create a Fantasy Uncharted

Uncharted might just be the best franchise for the PlayStation 3 home console from Sony, a series that manages to both push the limits of the included hardware and to deliver a cinematic, smooth, engaging experience.

But it seems that the lighthearted series might have been something completely different if Naughty Dog had followed its initial instinct and had made the first game in the series more inclined towards fantasy.

Speaking to the magazine Play Don Poole, who has worked as an environment modeler for Naughty Dog when the first Uncharted was being developed, stated, “We were talking about a more ‘realistic’ game in terms of how it was modelled and rendered but the concepts were much more far out. One was a forest world where the antagonists lived underground. It had elements of Tolkien in for sure.”

He added, “Sony kept pushing for a more realistic game in all respects. The market had changed a lot by then. The demographic was older and gritty shooters were really dominating. Sony wanted very much to get into that market share, it pushed all of its developers in this direction.”

It seems that Sony worked with all the third party studios that were creating games for the PlayStation 3 to push for realistic games, mainly because this would help to show off the computing power of the PS3.

The company was under pressure because the rival Xbox 360 from Microsoft was seeing a lot of sales for first person shooters and wanted something similar for its own platform.

It seems that initially part of the development team at Naughty Dog, which were veterans of the Jal & Daxter series, were not too interested in creating a realistic game but the pressure from Sony led to the Uncharted series as we know it now.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is set to launch on November 1.