Uncharted fan visit to Naughty Dog "super helpful"

A studio visit by a couple of critical fans has directly informed the contents of an upcoming patch for Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, resulting in changes to the much-criticised aiming.

“We took some time to investigate [the gunplay complaints] internally because in all of our focus testing - probably about three months of straight focus testing - we never got any feedback the aiming was unsatisfactory to those people," community manager Arne Meyer told GiantBomb of complaints about Uncharted 3's gunplay.

"And for us, it’s very hard. I mean, obviously because we’ve played around with this, so whatever we had internally we’d get used to very quickly.”

Unable to interpret and respond to the complaints, game director Justin Richmond asked whether the fans could actually visit Naughty Dog HQ and demonstrate.

“I posted on the NeoGAF forum where people were going through it in a very eloquent fashion, really explaining their gripes very clearly, and I said ‘Well, is anyone local that can come in and explain it to us?’" Meyer said.

“We showed them a before and after without telling them which one was changed to see how they liked these alternate settings that our programmer had come up with. As part of that process, we iterated on what the feedback was and we were making changes on the fly, and changing different things from what we originally changed to get the right feel for the aiming.”

Meyer said the invited fans were all business.

“They were really sharp in terms of being analytical and being able upfront with what the changes were, and they were very clear and direct about what it was, and it was actually super helpful for us,” he said.

As a result, an undated patch for Uncharted 3 will add a menu option for a second aiming system which more strongly resembles Uncharted 2's.

Thanks, Joystiq.