Interview: Keith Guerrette of Naughty Dog talks Uncharted 3

For a guy who's just arrived in New Zealand from Los Angeles the day before, Keith Guerrette doesn't seem particularly jetlagged as he talks me through a level of Uncharted 3 called 'Burning Chateau'. Unsurprisingly, our main character Nathan Drake is running through a chateau that's... well, burning. Guerette points to the wallpaper that's peeling off the walls in the fire - it shows quite remarkable attention to detail - and explains in an upbeat way that those details are one of the most challenging parts of his job as a visual effects artist.

The whole experience is extremely cinematic, as the Uncharted series always has been. Guerette is the perfect fit for his role at Naughty Dog - his background is not in the games industry, but in visual effects for film.

"I actually studied and taught visual effects for the film industry," he explains, "And at one point I had a student ask me, ‘How do you do visual effects for video games?’ and I didn’t know. I couldn’t actually answer."

Guerrette downloaded the Unreal 2 game engine - the latest engine from Epic Games at the time - to have a play with it. He liked the "immediate feedback" of creating effects for games.

"I don’t have to wait for something to simulate for hours to see that I need to change the viscosity [the flow of liquid] point-zero-zero-five units. And that’s what the job in film is!" he laughs.

After a stint at High Moon Studios working on games Dark Watch and The Bourne Conspiracy, Guerette moved to Naughty Dog, where he's worked for just over three years. But film is still an influence on him personally, and the Uncharted franchise.

"We have this term in the studio, we’ve been saying that we’re not trying to make a game, we’re trying to make an experience," he says. "And we’ve been saying that amongst ourselves the entire time, that we want it to be an emotional, story-driven experience."

"Even technologically speaking, film always does things first and then over the course of years we’re looking at what they’re doing and saying, ‘We might be able to do something like that. You know, if we don’t do this and we don’t do that, because we don’t need it to look that good, we might be able to get this running on the PS3.'"

Taking the next graphical leap on the PlayStation 3

Guerrette is passionate about his work - when I tell him about a news story from a few days prior, where Justin Richmond said he didn't think the graphics for Uncharted 3 could get much better on the PlayStation 3, Guerrette is alarmed.

"Who was that at Naughty Dog? I’m going to smack ‘em when I get back!"

"No, to be honest, internally we’re starting to realise that it’s not actually on the tools or the hardware," he goes on to explain. "Obviously the hardware gives us our ceiling, our limitations of how many particles I can draw on screen, but we’re to the point where the art and the development team that’s making that art is actually the impediment, they’re the ones that really need to succeed."

"The limitations are actually on the artist and how good of a game they can actually make."

Guerrette is confident that the Uncharted team has that talent to keep pushing - and so is the rest of the company.

"Christophe [Balestra], one of our vice presidents, has this saying that completely caught me off-guard when I first started," he says. "‘Honestly, if someone comes in and takes one of our secrets home and that makes them better than us, we’ve failed.'"

The improvements between Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3 will be obvious to anyone who's played the former and seen trailers for the latter, but the devil's in the details.

"There’s a chase sequence that I think you’re gonna really enjoy in this game where you’re running, and if I were running through a narrow corridor and I have to turn a corner, I’m going to plant my hand on something to change direction. And we have Drake proceed to do that as he’s walking around, he’ll actually move his hand to plant on things and stuff like that," he says.

It's something Naughty Dog has done before, but the difference is that now the system works not just at certain points in the game.

"We’ve definitely done it as much as possible but in [Uncharted 1] they were cases where that animation was only specifically being used there," he says. "And so we knew, with that animation, Drake is going to react at this time, rather than it being an automated, natural system."

Not just visuals

While Guerrette, being an effects artist, is understandably passionate about the visuals in the Uncharted series, he speaks a lot about other key elements of the games. The storyline is particularly important to him.

"The story in Uncharted 3 is my favourite of all of them so far," he says. "I think we did a fantastic job adding the same level of character involvement and relationship involvement, but I think there’s a lot more depth in this one and I think you’re really going to enjoy it."

"Uncharted 3 has got a little bit more of a story-based beginning [than Uncharted 2]. It’s gonna be a little bit slower, but it’s to get you involved and to get you emotionally drawn in by the time you pull into the action."

The voice acting, which Guerrette says is done with motion capture and a lot of improvisation, has also been a key focus of the series, and some of Uncharted 3's voice actors have been keeping extremely busy.

Claudia Black, who plays Chloe Frazer, was Sam in Gears of War 3 earlier this year and has done work for Rage, Mass Effect 2, and Crysis. Nolan North, who voices Nathan Drake, was also Penguin in new release Batman: Arkham City and voiced the Space, Adventure and Fact cores in Portal 2.

"I feel like he’s in almost every game that comes out these days," Guerrette laughs.

Showcasing Uncharted 3 at the Armageddon Expo

Guerrette isn't just in the country to talk to press - fans will get a chance to get a sneak peek when he gives a presentation about Uncharted 3 ("some of the marketing bulletpoints, unfortunately"), and shows off an unseen section of the game in which Drake comes to a lost village in the middle of the Rub' al Khali desert. There'll also be some behind-the-scenes footage on show.

But what Guerrette's really excited about is talking to fans, which is something he doesn't get to do often.

"When I go into work, we work in Santa Monica, we work in a business complex, and it’s a bunch of entertainment lawyers and producers and stuff around us," he says.

"We’re passionate about what we’re doing, we’re trying to make a game that we’re really proud of, but at the end of the day I don’t really have this concept of fans that are really so excited to play my game. So being able to come out all the way to New Zealand to meet people and have people come up to me and shake my hand, it’s such a cool experience."

Keith Guerrette will give his presentation and take questions on Uncharted 3 at the Armageddon Expo at ASB Showgrounds on Saturday 29 October at 12pm.

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