Sony has released a new video for Uncharted: Golden Abyss, the upcoming game in the Uncharted series for the PlayStation Vita, that provides information on how motion capture is used to help create the characters in the game. It’s quite interesting, and even if you’re not an Uncharted fan it’s still worth watching for anyone curious about what goes into making games. You can check it out here. (Note: Video contains some rough language.)
Uncharted: Golden Abyss is a prequel to the rest of the uncharted series and follows protagonist Nathan Drake’s adventures prior to the events of his debut in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. It’s been revealed that this time the story takes place in Central America and focuses on a mystery involving a Spanish expedition that vanished four centuries ago. The game is planned to be one of the launch titles for the Vita, and is scheduled to come out in North America and Europe alongside the new handheld itself on February 22nd.
Golden Abyss is an example of something about the Vita that interests me, which is how the game will incorporate the Vita’s touchscreen feature. For instance, the player will have the ability to switch weapons by touching the appropriate icon on the Vita screen instead of pressing a button. I like this sort of thing a great deal, since one of the annoying things about handheld systems is that they typically have fewer buttons than controllers for home consoles do. The Vita, for instance, has two shoulder buttons compared to the standard PlayStation controller’s four. You can pretty much never have too many buttons, as far as I’m concerned- all the hours I put in with the Super NES port of PC space combat sim Wing Commander, which valiantly attempted to cram a game that used an entire PC keyboard onto seven buttons, taught me that much- so this rankles me a bit.
Using the system’s touchscreen features to offload commands that would have otherwise taken up precious button real estate seems like the best solution. The Nintendo DS has been doing that for years, obviously, but the DS is literally built around its touchscreen, whereas the Vita is using it specifically to supplement an otherwise conventional control setup. The DS’ approach is perfectly valid, as the colossal, Scrooge MMcDuckesque ocean of money Nintendo made from selling 150 million DS’ will gladly tell you. However, as someone who generally prefers a more conventional style of controls, what’s being described in Golden Abyss seems like a promising approach.
There’s also apparently some gyroscope-based motion control elements incorporated into the game, which is something I’m not so enthusiastic about- most of the attempts I’ve seen to do something like that on the PlayStation 3 with the Six Axis control have seemed pointless and gimmicky. The chief exception that comes to mind is the fairly obscure first-person shooter Timeshift, where you could do a melee attack by physically thrusting the controller away from your body.(Having an active enemy in hand-to-hand combat range in that game generally meant something had gone awry and you were in trouble, so being able to dispense with remembering which button to press to fight your way out when death was staring you in the face in favor of just flailing out wildly was pretty handy.) Otherwise, I haven’t been that impressed, though perhaps the Vita make more interesting use of the idea then the PlayStation 3 generally has.
All in all, though, I like where Sony is going with this.
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