PS3 Fanboy

We've known for some time now that Naughty Dog's incredible fan-favorite Uncharted is getting Trophy support via an upcoming patch. However, we haven't heard of a time frame ... until now. An interview with Joystiq reveals that the patch was "incredibly easy" to implement because the game "already contains preliminary support fro Trophies via its Medals rewards system." However, don't expect to get any Trophies retroactively ... you're going to have to earn them all over again. (Considering how good the game is, we won't complain!)

Interestingly, Naughty Dog's Evan Wells included these "hooks" for Trophy support because the team believed Sony would implement the feature before the launch of Uncharted last November. Guess those guys were a bit too foward-thinking. Regardless, we can't wait to boost our PlayStation Level.

This mini-interview may be short, but in answering these questions Evan Wells of Naughty Dog puts pay to a few little niggles we had regarding Uncharted and its potential future. Discussions are underway within the Naughty Dog offices regarding where the series can go next. We can't wait to see what they come up with. Beware going beyond the jump; there be spoilers (and pirates).

Why was the option for an "Install" feature not added to the game?

We wanted gamers to be able to start playing the game as rapidly as possible. It's always frustrating as a player to be so excited to start playing a game that you've been looking forward to for so long and you just can't wait any longer and then when you pop in the disc it makes you sit through an agonizingly long install screen. With Uncharted we designed the game so that you can play through the entire experience without a load screen AND without installing a bunch of extra data to fill up your hard drive.

So, Naughty Dog's Evan Wells has been answering questions over at ThreeSpeech. We're jealous, since you all should know how much we love Uncharted. Some of these questions are good, some are left for the more techno-savvy or tech-fetish folk. Check out the full Q&A session for the complete story.

- Wells indirectly says "no" to both multiplayer and DLC -- with all the medals and unlockables, no downloadable content is planned right now. No multiplayer either, since the team wanted to create the best single-player experience possible.

- Uncharted is using approximately 33% of the PS3's available power. We're about 76% sure that he's making up about 28% of that statistic, but we wouldn't be surprised if much better stuff gets squeezed from the PS3 in the future.

- The medals will likely turn into Home trophies when the time comes.

If you want to hear about screen tearing, or the time spent in each phase of the development process, please read ThreeSpeech's complete interview.

Discounting the excellent PSP-exclusive Daxter, it's been a while since we've seen a new iteration of Naughty Dog's action platformer. With work finished on Uncharted, Naughty Dog's Evan Wells had a few things to say to ThreeSpeech. The engine used to create the beautiful vistas of Uncharted will certainly be used as the foundation for their next game. "We will most definitely continue to build on the Uncharted code base with all of our future titles for the PlayStation3. We have a lot of very sophisticated systems that are general purpose and could be used for a wide variety of genres. It's very exciting to think what we can do with this tech now that it's in place and we can focus on accomplishing something even more ambitious."

Of course, what could the team be working on next? "Jak and Daxter is a definite possibility some time in the future. There is a lot of interest around the office in going back to that franchise and seeing what we could do with it using the Uncharted engine."

Granted, we'd be more than ecstatic for the announcement of either a new Jak or Uncharted game. Leave it to Naughty Dog to create characters that we just can't get enough of.

In an interview with 1Up, Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra of Naughty Dog detail the status of the company and how they feel moving forward onto other projects. Reiterating that Uncharted was developed as a franchise from the outset, Balestra states that everyone at Naughty Dog is incredibly eager to get stuck into their next project. With only 30% of the SPUs being harnessed for their first outing on the PlayStation 3, they seem determined to see what else they can do in the future.

The Naughty Dogs also explain that in migrating to the PS3, they had to leave behind their proprietary programming language, Lisp, and start from scratch. Now that they have, any future endeavours will be that much easier with their (not so) basic grounding in coding for the machine fully established. Check out the full interview for more insight into the company behind Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.