14 DAY TRIAL // Sony and Naughty Dog have announced that the planned integration of the popular communication service Twitter into their upcoming Uncharted 2: Among Thieves has been dialed down a lot. Initially, the plan was for the game to log into the Twitter account of the gamer playing it in order to send out messages when each chapter and sub-chapter was completed. There were some reports that this caused multiple updates to be released in an hour and that some Twitter users considered it to represent spam.
This has spurred Sony to limit functionality. A post on the official PlayStation blog reads “We obviously want to provide the best experience for everybody, so for the time being we’ve disabled Twitter updates on chapter completions. The option will still exist in the menus when the game ships on 10/13, but if activated, it will do nothing. Some time after the game has shipped, we’ll release a patch to reactivate the feature, but with a limit on the frequency of updates.”
A lot of players who commented when the Twitter integration was initially announced noted that it was something pretty useless to most gamers, as only the hardcore crowd would be interested in telling everyone following them about the progress they were making.
It would have probably been more interesting for Uncharted 2 to integrate closely with the PlayStation 3 friends list, offering more ways to connect with gamers sure to care about the videogames rather than those using Twitter, who might be indifferent.
Still, it's nice to see both Sony and Naughty Dog listening to the feedback they have been getting from early reviewers and the community in general and tweaking the feature so that it is more limited in scope and easier to control by the user.