There's a long interview of Christophe Balestra here.
http://www.jvn.com/jeux/articles/uncharted-3-interview-exclusive-de-christophe-balestra.html?page=3
It's in French so here's a translation I made (please, be indulgent, English is not my mother tongue^^)
Enjoy!
Exclusive for the Official Playstation Magazine and JVN.com, Christophe Balestra is spilling the beans about Uncharted 3 : Drake’s Deception!
Jean-Charles Daguinot, editor in chief of the Official Playstation Magazine, had the honor to discover Uncharted 3 : Drake’s Deception in Santa Monica. It was the occasion to get a lot of informations for the next issue of the Official Playstation Magazine that will be available on December 28, in which he will give the details of the incredible scenes that he was lucky to see. He also came back with a great interview with Christophe Balestra, the French co-president of Naughty Dog.
Jean-Charles Daguinot : How do you feel about Uncharted 2’s success?
Christophe Balestra : Uncharted 2 was kinda special to us because of the success we got. Everybody really liked it. That was not something we had expected because we don’t make games for the success they may get, but more to make games that we want to play. That was really special because we got some crazy scores and a lot of awards. I think we have beaten many records with that, which was kinda ridiculous actually. So, it was a little hard to get back into the swing of things. After Uncharted 2, we took some rest, but getting back to work after so much success was a little… There was a lot of distraction but we managed to go back on our feet and start working on the sequel which is Uncharted 3!
Jean-Charles Daguinot : What has Uncharted changed for you? More resources, more pressure?
Christophe Balestra : We moved right after Uncharted 2. We needed more space for many reasons. Testing the game, for the single and multi player requires a lot of people and we didn’t anticipate that on Uncharted 2, so that’s one of the reasons why we moved. During the last months, we often need a lot of people who come to work with us. In our previous place, we didn’t have enough space for them. But we absolutely wanted our own mo’cap studio at home to be able to perform small mo’cap sessions here and then for the gameplay and so on. Besides, it was part of a bigger project where we wanted our own mo’cap studio, which is much larger and which is situated very close to home, in Culver City, something like 15 minutes away. And so here we are. We also wanted a movie theater. If we want to show our game, we might as well do it in good conditions. Now, is there more pressure? Not necessarily, I don’t think so. We put it enough on ourselves anyway. We don’t need to have pressure from the outside. Actually, we know when we make things right as soon as we put ourselves in difficult situations, where we know it’s not easy. That’s the best pressure we can have. Trying to have goals that are hard to attain, that seem impossible at the beginning, is enough. It allows us to move forward. Outside pressure is not a big deal when compared to that.
Jean-Charles Daguinot : Uncharted 3 will partly take place in the desert. Was it a will to change the setting ?
Christophe Balestra : It’s true that we wanted to change the setting. It would be a shame to stay in a situation that people have already experienced. So yes, there is sand. We wanted the desert because there are a lot of things to do with it. We can’t talk about them today but that was a technical challenge, people will see how it integrates in the story. Everything will make sense when people know more. We like exotic places and since Nathan is a treasure hunter, he will necessarily go to exotic places, and desert is one of them. There’s also France : today’s demo took place in a castle in France. Nathan will travel quite a lot in Uncharted 3, he will go to the desert and the Middle East.
Jean-Charles Daguinot: The level we saw today showed a burning castle and was technically very impressive. How did you manage to improve since Uncharted 2?
Christophe Balestra : Sand is a new element in Uncharted but we’ve also worked a lot on fire. So, the burning castle you’ve seen in today’s demo is, technically, very hard to do. We’ve got a team of artists who always want to push things further, which makes the game run very slowly. Then, they go to the programmers who try to optimize things. There’s a constant exchange between the artists and the programmers, we really work as a team. What does that mean? It means we optimize things, it means we write new shaders, it means we work on new technologies. The wallpaper which will burn, will first wind around, then catch fire. There are many things like this where we get inspiration from each other. A lot of technologies are needed for this, but in the end, it’s not what people really appreciate. It’s rather the final result that creates an incredible experience and something we’ve never done in the previous Uncharted games.
Jean-Charles Daguinot : Multiplayer is a big stake in Uncharted 3, can you talk about it ?
Christophe Balestra : We can’t really talk about Uncharted 3’s multiplayer yet but we’ve got a lot of ambition. We really want to compete with the “big boys” and become one, if not the multiplayer reference on the Playstation 3. We put a lot of effort into it at the moment in order to get something that will more than hold water. No details yet but we’re very ambitious and multiplayer will be a big part of Uncharted 3.