GDC 2019, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy has problems - Ultimate Guide

Many will surely remember the giraffes of The Last of Us.Uncharted: the lost legacy of the elephants, has been one of the most named parts.

The moments of peace, really bring peace and tranquility to the players in an action videogame, or good, in most cases.

At least in the case of Uncharted, the elephants of the lost legacy were not the best option to get the tranquility of the players, not even themselves. It could really be a fairly simple scene, but Naughty Dog found several stones on the way. Jumping dodging and remaking, they managed to extract potential from the problem that had been generated.

Naughty Dog storyteller Marianne Hayden said during the GDC talk that the elephants had been placed at a great distance on the open level of the Western Ghats near the beginning of the game.

Something that the players did not cause any emotion, see elephants in the distance, it was not what they wanted more interaction.

So the developers led the elephants to be closer to what the players imagined. But now it was not just to have the elephants nearby, now it was necessary for the players to touch and mount them.

The team added a tool that allowed caressing the younger elephants and riding the adults, using the technology they used in the Uncharted 3 horse sequences.

An idea that was ridiculously unreal, caressing a baby elephant in front of its parents without these attacking you was ridiculous.

Marianne Hayden demonstrated this by publishing a photograph of a car that had been crushed by a real elephant.

All including the video game director agreed to think the same, what he had done was very silly and unreal. But unfortunately the players that was what they wanted, riding elephants.

Hayden explained how to fit the team's overall objectives in the games by saying:

"Naughty Dog design influences history and history often influences design," he said. "The history and the gameplay are developed in concert. One often does not come without the other. Naughty Dog often creates sequences of scripts in which the player has limited control and still allows for a cinematic moment and these moments in the games are always more emotional and have more impact when someone is on the stick as opposed to the cut scenes. This can present challenges. "

This meant that both the story and the design had to mesh to get a player to ride an elephant in a possible way and to work with the narrative and within the mechanics.

In the process, the elephants managed to move from the Western Ghats at the beginning to a place near the end where the antagonist had caused a lot of explosions, but this at the same time generated a way that would make the player mount an elephant without becoming unreal .

The players had to climb and knock down debris to clear the path of the elephants to get the player to ride the elephant on the clear path, your help the elephant to move forward and he helps you.

But this still generates a problem, how to get the elephant to kneel in order to climb it.

The solution was to place debris on the elephant so that it could be physically on the beast to remove it.

Surely this was reason for sigh for the team.

However, yes, it brought another problem ... This point of view broke the camera of the game, since it could cross the rear end or the head of the beast. What brought more things to work on.