Uncharted 3: Naughty Dog Explains How They Implemented The Crazy Cargo Plane Sequence

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is the game to play this year. Uncharted 3 manages to build upon the awesomeness that was Uncharted 2 and not only that, it manages to surpass that. As I mentioned in my review of Uncharted 3, the game manages to keep the player involved with epic set pieces, one after the other.

One such sequence was the crazy cargo plane sequence in which ***spoiler starts*** Nathan Drake takes on bad guys while they are flying thousands of the feet above the ground. This set piece was characterized by dynamic lightning coming through the window and the way the plane crashes. ***spoiler ends***

In an interesting interview with IGN, Naughty Dog’s lead effects artist, Keith Guerrette talked about how they started planning with the level and how it literally took them months to finish that 20-minute odd level.

He talks about how the plane is moving in a 3D plane and how they came up with of light beams. Guerrette  says,”The plane is actually moving through 3D space, so it’s rocking back and forth and it’s diving and doing all these things, and there are these beams of light coming in through the window that, when we first had the plane moving around and stuff, all of us were like, ‘Why are we doing this? You can’t tell, you’re stuck in it, so it’s not like you actually have any concept of it.’ ‘How about if we open up some windows and have beams of light shining in?’

He also talks about how it took them two months to work on that small section. “We spent, like, two months – I mean, not only working on this, but about two months from start to finish – building this tech to make it so that I can attach a beam of light projected from the window, down onto the ground, that orients correctly based off of the position of the sun against the plane. So I’ve watched a lot of people play that demo and I’ve always asked them, ‘This is probably an odd question, but did you guys even notice that the beams of light were moving?’ And the answer that I’ve always gotten is, ‘What beams of light?’

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception got a perfect 10/10 from us and is a game you should simply pick up. You can check our review here.