Naughty Dog responds to single-player complaints over gunplay

Naughty Dog has responded to complaints from Uncharted 3 players who feel gunplay in the game is restricted.

According to various posts on the net, including NeoGAF and the Naughty Dog forums, some of the complaints stem from changes to the way L1 aims in the single-player campaign.

Players also state that the game tends to "force perfectly-horizontal and perfectly-vertical aiming", with the reticule slowing down when hovering over an enemy reducing it to sort of an "auto-aim."

According to users, this makes it a bit difficult to compensate for when trying to line-up a head shot on an enemy.

In response, community manager Arne Meyer stated that the single-player game has guns working in a "completely different way" in this outing than they did in Uncharted 2.

"Keep that in mind, as it affects your perception of gun combat as a whole since it's very easy to want to compare the two sets of mechanics between the two games," he said.

"In Uncharted 2 the bullets would leave the barrel at a pre-set deviation when you were aimed in. What this means is that the bullets would not fire straight out of the barrel all the time - they could come out at an angle. Therefore, you could have a target clearly in the reticule and still miss it by a wide margin. This was frustrating, because it was difficult to tell why you were missing a target.

"As a result, we wanted to be sure you had a better grasp of whether you were hitting or missing a target. In Uncharted 3 the bullets now fire straight out of the barrel 100 percent of the time. However, we have recoil - where the reticule moves/bounces as you fire. Therefore, it is easier to tell if you are missing or hitting a target. Now it is much more obvious when you are hitting or missing based on the reticule itself."

Meyer went on to say that aiming in the game is identical to Uncharted 2, with only the sensitivity adjusted higher to provide more accuracy.

"With Uncharted 2 it was pretty much guaranteed you would aim in one of the eight directions and it was hard to deviate from that (imagine it being almost like a traditional eight-way arcade stick)," he said. "With Uncharted 3, you can deviate from the straight path from each of the eight directions much easier and more precisely.

"Perhaps one of the more significant changes revolves around the accuracy to the AK rifles. In Uncharted 2, you could fire the AK across the map with extreme accuracy, and thus players would tend to stick with the AK all the time. In Uncharted 3, we changed the AK to be used at closer ranges to encourage players to use other guns rather than just keeping the AK the entire game.

"Fact is, the AK in Uncharted 3 isn't great at long range intentionally. The GMAL or the M9 are much better choices for long range combat. Don't forget that the AK also works much better and with better accuracy if you burst fire it rather than just holding the trigger down."

Not much was changed with multiplayer gunplay from the July Beta or Multipayer Experience, except that players are now 3% faster in that mode, and sprint duration is 2 seconds lower. The team also "brought in the auto-acquire zone for blindfire" by a significant margin."

You can read the complaints and the response through the links.

Uncharted 3 is in stores now.

Thanks, Eurogamer.