Naughty Dog's latest creation, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune , is right around the corner, and the studio's Co-President, Evan Wells, has updated us on the game's progress. Thanks to a recent post over at the official PlayStation blog, Wells says they're entering the final development stages and are "chasing down the last bugs and making a few minor balancing tweaks here and there." The game looks very promising, that's for sure.
Here's a portion of the post, where Wells talks about the process, and how far along they are:
"We’ve had our last major focus test week last week too, and we received the data we need to make sure that the gameplay is finely tuned for our final release. This is a process that we take very seriously here at Naughty Dog and something we’ve been doing since the Crash Bandicoot days. We test the game over the course of a week and track a huge number of statistics from the types of weapons used, the amount of time spent in each area, and the number of times the players died. We then use this data to smooth out the difficulty and fix any puzzles or layouts that are too tricky to figure out. This will be the fourth time we do a full focus test like this and we are actually going to squeeze a final mini test in right before we Gold Master to make sure a bug didn’t creep in to mess up our tuning."
He also mentions that several Naughty Dog employees have had the chance to actually sit down and play a semi-finished build of the game. They have less than four weeks to go, and Wells says they're "seeing the light at the end of the tunnel." He also pointed us in the direction of the Uncharted: Drake's Fortune official website , which is now open for your perusal.
Lastly, he revealed that a playable demo should hit the PlayStation Store soon, although he didn't provide us with an exact release date. We'll be looking for that demo, and we hope the team can deliver the goods 'cuz this one looks super fun.