An Uncharted Tech Retrospective

That surely was educational.

This is really cool! I would love to see more stuff like this about the game development process, but I think it would work better if the gameplay was prerecorded.

This was really cool. Please do more stuff like this. Seems like the kind of thing Gb can lead on given your strong links with the best and brightest in the industry.

This is a great video, and it also reminded me of how stupid I am.

Loved this. Not much to add apart from a big attaboy to Brad.

I think it can be done without another person as long is each talking point is well-prepared so you don't have to spend too much attention to playing (thank god for easy mode). That way the interviewer should be able to concentrate more on the talk.

I guess you could also have the dev play for a bit to demonstrate certain things or to shake things up but only if they are very good at the game themselves so they can also afford to spend most of their attention on the interview.

The other option is having games with separate save states (depending on the game) ready so there doesn't have to be a lot of actual playing and you can mostly just showcase specific scenes. This requires even more preparation of course.

200 posts and no one has figured out the secret button combination?

Techrospective

@dwigtk: No spoilers

@none_braver said:200 posts and no one has figured out the secret button combination?

Good luck with that :P

This was great and a really nice change of pace for the site. I really hope this can turn into a more regular thing getting an industry veteran to sit down and tell us some of the magic behind their games. Even for games that aren't considered that good a lot of work goes into them that is often unseen or unappreciated by the players and this seems like a great way to champion some of that work.

I finally finished Uncharted 4! I just wanted to chime in here and say thanks to @brad as I really enjoyed this content.

Awesome stuff! :D

I really hope you guys do more of this with other games.

This was an awesome idea for a feature. REALLY interesting, I really hope this type of thing becomes way more common!

Is the difficulty thing visible on this video? I kept staring at the spot, but i didn't see a vertical line or something.

I understand very, very little of what is being discussed here, but I'm utterly fascinated by it. Thanks for this feature!

Brad did such an amazing job on this. PLEASE interview Sony Santa Monica next about PS2 to PS3 God of War! Also, for a Microsoft spin, Epic releasing UT3 for both consoles, and the struggles of Gears 1 vs. Gears 3. It'll be great to hear the technical breakdowns of all of those.

Very insightful. Auper informative. Would love to see more videos like this.

Great stuff. Maybe have a 3rd play the game so Brad can focus on the interview?

Can confirm that most of the cutscenes in Uncharted 4 is in-engine because I only found one instance where entering photo mode didn't allow me to remove characters and change depth of field during a cutscene.

Kind of wish they'd looked at The Last of Us as well between 3 and 4. But perhaps the biggest difference graphically between Uncharted 3 and TLoU is in art design and not so much in the actual tech?

This is awesome, hope to see more like it.

Does anyone know of any sites doing similar stuff to this, but preferably more technical?

One of the most fascinating deep dives on the creation of a score is found in this video on youtube:

Austin Wintory, the composer for Journey and many a game before and since, completely annotates nearly every second of this score, explaining the instrumentation, composing, how the interplay between the game and the score pushed both to be better, and how when you create a "soundtrack" as was released for Journey, you actually can take liberties with the elements of each piece of music that might play throughout a level to create something that is literally impossible to hear perfectly represented in-game.

It's a fascinating look at a beautiful score for a beautiful game, and it made me appreciate both even more than I already did.

While it is true that Brad isn't equipped to speak programmer-to-programmer about the nitty-gritty, the VAST majority of the Giant Bomb audience isn't either. Even a brief perusal of the comments will show that much of the technical aspects of the talk went over a lot of folks' heads. The beautiful thing about getting someone like Brad to run this conversation is that he's able to break things down to a level where laypeople are much more likely to comprehend the complicated topics at-hand.

Also, from a sheer numbers point-of-view, I guarantee that the crew at taking a close look at how many eyeballs they get on videos, and having a broad appeal (and a super positive reception, as this has received) means that we as fans are much more likely to get more things like this than if it was a super niche talk programmer-to-programmer that most of the audience wouldn't understand.

I really loved this feature. I've always been really interested in how these games I love so much come together on the back end. Please do more of these with anyone willing to sit and talk.

I really want to watch this but I'm not very far into Uncharted 4 (chapter 9) - how much of the game is spoiled in terms of locations and/or big set pieces?

Fantastic feature! Very informative and entertaining too. Its crazy how old the first uncharted looks now, even though it was an amazing technical piece in its time. And then equally amazing how far they've come with the tech.

Would love to see you guys do one of these with a developer of the recent Doom game.

Finally got some time to watch this - really fascinating and I hope GB does more. Kudos to Brad for doing this. I think the tech level was about right - enough that other coders can relate, but no so much the general audience gets completely left behind. You do need the right person in the other chair though, and kudos to John for also walking that line. Speaking as a programmer who works at a non-technical company, I fully appreciate how hard it is to walk that line.

This was awesome

OH GOD THANK YOU FOR THIS I SEE IT NOW

Great video, I love watching post-mortems and the like, very enlightening even for an outsider like myself who's just interested in how the sausage is made. I mean, look at that stair mount at 1:20:34, even that small inconsequential animation looks so much better and more natural than in 99% of the games out there (not an actual statistic, pulled it right out of my ass to prove a point).

Super late on coming to this but Digital Foundry did a break down of the game and it's just a technical marvel. After Uncharted 4, I'd really love to see what ND could do with all the power of PC hardware.

Thank you for doing this! It was really interesting and would love to see more content like this!

@none_braver: Hold L2+R2+triangle. It takes a while to fade into view. On my current playthough the little peg is at the top of the scale on normal which must explain why the enemies are so damn accurate and shoot me instantly into pieces if I'm out in the open :D

just wanted you to know that i think this is probably still the best video on the site. im a graphics programmer in training myself and this was actually super informative to me @brad . it's a very different perspective from the usual interviews with game designers or marketing people or game directors. would love more hardcore programmer videos like this sometime. :]

thanks, brad (and john bellomy!)

Thanks for these fascinating details. More dev tech talk videos like this are always welcome!