Speaking during an interview with FRVR, former Naughty Dog developer Benson Russell explained that dynamic difficulty scaling was added to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune to help create more of a challenge for the player if they were doing well, as the team felt it was too short otherwise.
Russell, who worked on the first three Uncharted games as well as The Last of Us over a ten-year career at Naughty Dog, explained that the environments were created ahead of anything else for the original Uncharted, with combat built around it.
We didn’t have a place for actual combat encounters but all this geo was made and we couldn’t go back and retrofit and make all new geo, so we had to find ways. When we were done, [it was] like: ‘This is a five hour game. We can’t charge 60 bucks for a five-hour game with no multiplayer, people are going to be pissed off.’
We ended up putting a dynamic difficulty system in, but its key thing was to slow the player down if they were too good. That’s one of the big ones. That’s one of the reasons why Uncharted 1 gets so hard.
If you’re doing really good for the difficulty level you have it set on… it’s all time-based. We would do a bunch of focus tests and we would grab the average times per encounter. If you beat a combat encounter faster than the average that we had, we would start cranking the difficulty.
Speaking in the same interview as previously reported, Russell said that he wouldn’t be interested in a remake of Nathan Drake’s first adventure, believing it wouldn’t make much sense. Instead, he believes that other games that aren’t as accessible as Uncharted and much older that would benefit from a modern overhaul.
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was released for the PS3 in November 2007, and was later remastered for the PS4 as part of the Nathan Drake Collection in 2015.