This episode of “The Lab” features 3 vs 3 Deathmatch games. Team sizes are limited to only three players, allowing each team ample room to execute new strategies in the selected medium size maps which were not possible with larger team sizes. You’ll have a significant advantage over a less organized opponent if your team manages to stick together as much as possible in this episode of “The Lab.”
The conditions to win a match have also been adjusted for the smaller team size – there is a 20 minute time limit and 25 kills by one team will end the match. We have also disabled boosters for all matches in this playlist.
The Sanctuary
The Train Wreck
The Temple
We’ll be opening the 3 vs 3 Deathmatch discussion thread on the Naughty Dog community forums at about the same time “The Lab” starts this weekend. Be sure to leave your thoughts after you’ve had a chance to play a few rounds!
I’m really looking forward to PAX Prime this weekend. It’s going to be awesome to spend time checking out what all the other developers and publishers are showing off, attending a ton of panels, speaking on three panels and – hopefully – running into some of our fans and community members.
What we’re NOT up to at PAX Prime is making any kind of announcements… just in case you were wondering.
So, what am I bringing up to PAX Prime? A couple of weeks ago, we asked you which UNCHARTED characters you would like to have on an order of 1-inch buttons we were placing. The results of our survey came in last Monday and we immediately placed an order for buttons featuring Nathan Drake, Victor Sullivan, Elena Fisher and Chloe Frazer. You check out a photo of the buttons below and on our Flickr page.
You’ll notice we’re bringing more than four buttons with us – we’ll reveal the other two buttons, including a limited, very special design, over the next two days leading up to PAX Prime.
On Friday, September 3, I will be speaking on three panels – “What Do Fans Want? Fan Feedback on Community” at 3:30 PM in Serpent Theatre, “Movin’ on Up: How to Make It (Or Not) in Videogames Journalism” at 4:30 PM in Unicorn Theatre and “The Various Roads to Becoming a Community Manager” at 6:00 PM in Unicorn Theatre.
If you miss everything else, I strongly suggest you come by the “What Do Fans Want?” panel – all of us on the panel want to know directly from you – our fans – how we can improve our website offerings and how we can do better in working with our respective communities. Show up, or else! (Kidding.)
The final way is to follow our @Naughty_Dog Twitter account to find out where I’ll be and how to run into me at various points throughout PAX Prime.
“The Lab” starts up again in the first weekend of September – that’s next week, along with Labor Day and PAX Prime – and we hope you’ll join us.
If you’re new to “The Lab,” welcome! “The Lab” is a special playlist we will be running for a limited time on designated weekends, roughly every other weekend. You can access “The Lab” playlist within the set of playlists found in Matchmaking in UNCHARTED 2 multiplayer. During each weekend “The Lab” is active, we’ll be running a specialized playlist featuring one or more custom-tuned gametype variations from the tons of variables we can tweak in our multiplayer gameplay settings.
We’ll also be hosting a new thread for every event on the Naughty Dog community forums to get your feedback and thoughts on each one of our “The Lab” events.
“The Lab” episodes for September are:
September 3 - 7 3 vs 3 Deathmatch
We’ve dropped two of everything for all matches in this Deathmatch variation – you’ll have two less teammates and two less Boosters to aid in your domination of the opposing team.
September 17 - 20 Desert - 5 Shootout
In this episode of “The Lab,” you’ve only got your trusty eight-shooter, the Desert - 5, to rely on against your opponents.
This episode of “The Lab” features Team Deathmatch games, but with all power weapons removed from the selected maps. That means there is no more rushing for the M-32 Hammer at the beginning of the match, no waiting for the tank to come rumbling through The Village to grab the RPG. In the three maps listed below, we’ve removed all trace of the Desert – 5, M4, Dragon Sniper, Moss – 12, SAS – 12, Pistole, RPG – 7, GAU – 19, and the M32 – Hammer.
Yeah, that means the only tools left in your arsenal are the AK47, FAL, 92FS – 9MM, Micro – 9MM and the Mk-NDI grenades.
The active maps for this weekend of “The Lab” are:
The Plaza
The Train Wreck
The Village
We’ll be opening the No Power Weapons discussion thread on the Naughty Dog community forums at about the same time “The Lab” starts this weekend. Be sure to leave your thoughts after you’ve had a chance to play a few rounds!
I’m heading up to Seattle in a couple of weeks just to check out PAX Prime 2010 (and sit in on a few panels). As the date for PAX Prime started to draw near, we figured I should bring something cool to hand out to our fans over the weekend. We’re going to order a limited run of 1-inch buttons featuring a selection of UNCHARTED characters, but we were having a little bit of a hard time narrowing down which characters we wanted to print on the 4 buttons. That’s where you come in…
To help us decide which characters we’ll print on the buttons, check out the survey below and rank, from 1 (least favorite) to 10 (most favorite), your favorite UNCHARTED characters that are listed. The survey will end on Monday, August 23, at around 10:00 AM PDT. Oh, and you have to rank at least 4 characters.
[EDIT: The survey has ended - stay tuned to see who made the cut!]
Thanks for helping us out—we hope to see you at the show!
New MP skins and Dynamic Theme available on August 17
Over on the PlayStation.Blog, we revealed that there’s some more UNCHARTED 2 downloadable content to be released on the PlayStation Network Store next week – a multiplayer skin pack with eight new skins and a PS3 Dynamic Theme. If you’ve been reading our community forums, you probably found out about the multiplayer skins a few weeks ago, but now it’s official and we’ve got a release date for you—Tuesday, August 17, 2010.
There’s been a ton of requests for all kinds of UNCHARTED 2 DLC up on our community forums (feel free to add more!), so that’s exactly where we headed when we were looking for ideas for our next set of multiplayer skins. After a little group decision making, we settled on these eight skins for the UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves Sidekick Skins Pack:
Heist Chloe
Borneo Chloe
Borneo Sullivan
UDF Sullivan
Winter Sullivan
Wetsuit Elena
Dillon
Mac
You can check out a selection of screenshots featuring these multiplayer skins in our Flickr set.
Also available on the PlayStation Network Store that day is the UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves Dynamic Theme for your PS3. You can get a good look at the Dynamic Theme in action in the video embedded below.
Both the UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves Sidekick Skins Pack and the Dynamic Theme are priced at $2.99 in North America.
If you’re located outside of the US and Canada, please check your local PlayStation Network Store for pricing in your region.
Co-op Crushing takes the Co-op Arena matches you’ve gotten used to and makes them much harder by giving you and your teammates Crushing level health. That means at about 80% your normal health, you’re a much softer target for the wave after wave of enemies trying to dispatch you in Survival or stop you from capturing the treasure in Gold Rush. We suggest that you find one or two more-than-capable teammates to get the most out of this “The Lab” variation of Co-op Arena!
The active maps for this weekend of “The Lab” are:
The Plaza – Gold Rush
The Village – Gold Rush
The Lost City – Survival
Please note, our original schedule stated that this episode of “The Lab” would have both Co-op Objective and Co-op Arena modes. We’ve since learned of an issue that prevents us from including Co-op Objective into this episode of “The Lab.” It works out better anyway since Co-op Arena does not have the selectable difficulty setting which Co-op Objective has.
Head over to the Naughty Dog community forums to post your impressions of “The Lab” once you’ve had a chance to play a few rounds. We’ll open the thread up when “The Lab” launches.
We hope the last two months of “The Lab” have been fun for all of you – from 2 vs. 2 Team Deathmatch to Plunder with pistols only to the explosive chaos of Grenades Only. We’ve been having a blast ourselves – no pun intended.
If you’re new to “The Lab,” welcome! “The Lab” is a special playlist we will be running for a limited time on designated weekends, roughly every other weekend. You can access “The Lab” playlist within the set of playlists found in Matchmaking in UNCHARTED 2 multiplayer. During each weekend “The Lab” is active, we’ll be running a specialized playlist featuring one or more custom-tuned gametype variations from the tons of variables we can tweak in our multiplayer gameplay settings.
We’ll also be hosting a new thread for every event on the Naughty Dog community forums to get your feedback and thoughts on each one of our “The Lab” events.
August has only two weekends of “The Lab” in store for all of us. They are:
August 6 – 9 Co-Op Crushing
Think you’ve mastered all of our Co-op modes? Give this episode of “The Lab” a try – we’ve lowered the health to Crushing levels in a selection of Co-op Objective and Co-op Arena maps.
August 20 – 23 No Power Weapons
Can you still dominate with the basic tools of UNCHARTED 2 multiplayer? During this weekend of “The Lab” we’ll be running Team Deathmatch but you’ll discover that all power weapons are absent on the selected maps. That means no weapons like the M-32 Hammer, GAU-19, SAS-12, Pistole, and more, will be available for pickup.
Video of our PAX East 2010 panel—Game Design with the Dogs
Missed out on attending PAX East this year? Didn’t get into the Naughty Dog panel because of the humongous line?
Lucky for you we took (slightly shaky) video of the whole darn thing and we’re making it available to everyone.
The point to our panel, “Naughty Dog Live and Unleashed – Game Design with the Dogs,” was to give everyone a peek inside the game design process at Naughty Dog. I joined three of our game designers – Richard Lemarchand, Jacob Minkoff, and Justin Richmond – on a frosty weekend in Boston to take on the challenge of developing a new gameplay sequence in UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune. We wanted to show off the same highly collaborative, iterative design process that we use all the time at Naughty Dog to design a new sequence, with some specific game and story goals in mind, to take place between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. To keep in the spirit of being highly collaborative, we also opened up the floor to audience questions and suggestions at a key point during our panel to give our fans a shot at influencing our game design decisions for this fictional chapter.
Head over to our YouTube page or watch the whole thing from the embedded video below.
Special thanks go out to James Stevenson from Insomniac Games for holding our heavy camera for nearly an hour to record this video.
Title Update 1.09 will be released in all regions on Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at about 10:00 AM PDT (what time is that in my city?).
Title Update 1.09 includes the following:
Changes made to multiplayer character skin system to allow for voices to be included with future skins
Made changes to character game mechanics to prevent players from using exploits
Fixed ability for players to “super throw” the treasure in Plunder matches
Cash awarded per kill in Elimination has been increased to $750 per kill
Enabled the ability for Naughty Dog to easily alter the amount of cash earned for individual Medals on a playlist or gametype basis and per-kill
Thanks to some of the changes above, we’ll be issuing a LiveData update that will rescale Medal cash awards in Objective games ONLY. For matches which fall under the Objective modes, cash for individual and kill-based medals have been decreased in value, while cash for Objective based medals have been increased as follows:
Tip Off – $1,000
Captured – $4,000
That’s Embarrassing – $10,000
Protectorate – $2,000
No Cigar – $2,000
Drop It – $1,000
None Shall Pass – $5,000
Expansionist – $5,000
Head over to our community forums and leave your feedback, questions or any issues you may have encountered with Title Update 1.09.
We’re proud to reveal that our next batch of UNCHARTED PSN Avatars will be available for purchase on the PlayStation Network Store on Tuesday, July 27, 2010.
Please note that the PlayStation Network Store updates at different times for each region – so please be patient as the Store update reaches your region.
This batch of PSN Avatars has a little bit of a throwback theme as we’re featuring characters from UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune and UNCHARTED: Eye of Indra – both stories covering events prior to UNCHARTED 2.
The new PSN Avatars will be available for purchase individually for $0.49 each, although you’ll get a much better value if you get one of the Avatar Packs, which includes 4 Avatars, and costs $1.25 per pack.
UNCHARTED Avatar Pack #3 includes:
Nathan Drake
Gabriel Roman
Atoq Navarro
Rika Raja
UNCHARTED Avatar Pack #4 includes:
Elena Fisher
Eddy Raja
Javier
Daniel Pinkerton
Please check your regional PlayStation Network Store for specifics on availability and local pricing.
Welcome back to the second episode of “The Lab” in July!
I have no doubt a bunch of you will be heading down to San Diego this weekend to attend Comic-Con, but in case you’re not able to attend Comic-Con, consider joining us in “The Lab.”
This episode of “The Lab” promises to be quite explosive with the Grenades Only variation of our standard Deathmatch mode. When we say Grenades Only, we mean grenades ONLY. Every player spawns with 99 grenades – that’s virtually an unlimited supply – to blow up everything in sight. Well, actually make an attempt and try not to kill your teammates. We’ve also disabled boosters for “The Lab” this weekend – it wouldn’t be much fun if just about everybody used Sure Foot, right?
The active maps for this weekend of “The Lab” are:
The Plaza
The Sanctuary
Train Wreck
The Village
We’ll be opening the Grenades Only discussion thread on the Naughty Dog community forums at about the same time “The Lab” starts this weekend. Be sure to leave your thoughts after you’ve had a chance to play a few rounds!
Last week, Google posted the effects of the World Cup on search engine queries to Google.com by country. They showed how much of an impact certain games, and the tournament overall, had on search activity – basically showing that, in general, significant amounts of people were focused solely on the World Cup during the fixture. Not surprising considering that soccer (or football) is considered the world’s most popular sport.
We figured we would take a look and see if we saw something similar with UNCHARTED 2 multiplayer. Before even looking, we expected to see the number of concurrent online players to drop during World Cup fixtures. We weren’t disappointed.
The graph below shows the typical curve of our concurrent online player population on an average day.
As you can see, we typically get our peak player population around the middle of the day, U.S. Pacific time.
Now let’s see what happened during the World Cup Third Place fixture, which was played on Saturday, July 10, 2010.
It’s pretty clear that a portion of our player population that is typically online was watching the World Cup fixture. It’s interesting to note that people started coming online before the game was over, much less decided, as the game-winning goal didn’t come until about four minutes before regulation time expired.
Now, we would expect to see a much more severe dip during the World Cup Final, and that’s precisely what we saw, as shown in the map below.
It’s not surprising that just about everybody watched the entire game before hopping back to playing UNCHARTED 2. Even after the game, not everybody came back – no doubt either celebrating Spain’s first World Cup or lamenting the loss suffered by the Netherlands.
Back in December 2009, Pyramind Studios hosted an exclusive behind-the-scenes event on the making of the music for UNCHARTED 2. For this event, Pyramind brought together a bunch of folks from SCEA, Skywalker Sound and the composer for our game, Greg Edmonson to discuss their experiences working on this production.
Hosted by Paul Lipson, COO/Composer at Pyramind Studios, the list of attendees included:
Greg Edmonson - UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves Composer
Leslie Ann Jones - Director of Music Recording & Scoring, Skywalker Sound
Clint Bajakian - Senior Music Manager, SCEA
Jonathan Mayer - Music Manager, SCEA
Scott Hanau - Music Editor, SCEA
Marc Senasac - Music Engineer, SCEA
Joel Yarger - Music Engineer, SCEA
Just a few days ago, they posted a video of highlights from An Evening with the UNCHARTED 2 Music Team – we’ve embedded the video below or you can head straight to the Pyramind YouTube channel. I think you’ll want to check it out!
This episode of “The Lab” is Plunder Pistols Only. This the the Plunder you know and love, or hate (or get farm killed on) but with one, significant, difference—everyone spawns with ONLY a 92FS - 9mm pistol. Oh, and a grenade. All the maps in this Plunder variant for “The Lab” only have 92FS pistols and grenades as available weapon pickups. This puts the treasure bearer and his assailants on equal ground as far as firepower, which is just the recipe needed for some intense, competitive Plunder matches.
The active maps for this weekend of “The Lab” are:
The Plaza
The Sanctuary
Train Wreck
Lost City
We’ll be opening the Plunder Pistols Only discussion thread on the Naughty Dog community forums at about the same time “The Lab” starts this weekend. Be sure to leave your thoughts after you’ve had a chance to play a few rounds.
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