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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteUncharted’s set pieces work best when spectacle grows out of the story, keeps the player involved, and has room to breathe between peaks. Building them takes more than staging an explosion: Naughty Dog’s accounts describe custom scripting, new technology, and careful integration. Former designer Benson Russell later argued that Uncharted 3’s attempt to pursue more set pieces made the game less even. That is a design judgment, not a measured verdict from players—but it points to a real production and pacing trade-off.
What counts as an Uncharted set piece?
There is no formal Naughty Dog definition in the accounts discussed here. For this article, a set piece means a conspicuous, authored sequence built around a major action or spectacle beat: a moving train, a collapsing structure, or another event that makes the level feel unusually large and dramatic.
The key distinction is that a set piece is not just a cinematic shot or a big explosion. Uncharted’s approach aimed to make the spectacle something the player could participate in, while connecting it to the level and surrounding story. In a 2009 interview, Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells described how major sequences depended on custom scripting “every moment of the way,” down to smaller environmental details. Wells’s interview with Joystiq, now at Engadget gives a sense of how much authored work sat behind the apparent spontaneity.
How Uncharted 2 made spectacle playable
Start with a design question
In his 2010 postmortem, designer Richard Lemarchand said Naughty Dog wanted a blockbuster experience that was “actively playable”: the game should preserve player control rather than routinely taking over for a cinematic. A moment in the first Uncharted helped frame the problem. When the player shot an explosive and a truck fell from a broken bridge, the team saw an opportunity to make more cinematic moments playable rather than simply showing them.
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Build the systems a sequence needs
The Uncharted 2 train sequence required more than a train model and a string of animations. Lemarchand described a chain of cars moving through streaming environments, along with a dynamic-object traversal system so Drake, allies, and enemies could use their abilities on moving objects. The work also supported other scenes, including the collapsing hotel and smaller collapsing-balcony moments. In other words, a major spectacle could justify technology that had uses beyond its headline sequence.
Lemarchand’s 2010 Uncharted 2 postmortem frames the game’s creation as 22 months. A separate GameSpot report on his DICE 2010 presentation describes six months of preproduction in that 22-month cycle, a 70-row macro-design spreadsheet at its conclusion, and a final game that Lemarchand reportedly said deviated from the macro design by 5 to 10 percent. Those are figures from the designer’s account as reported at the time, not an independent production audit.
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Integrate scripting, mechanics, and story
Wells’s description of custom event scripting helps explain the production cost: designers and engineers have to arrange what happens at each moment, not merely set a broad action in motion. The broader production accounts suggest a useful way to judge the craft: does the event keep the player involved, does its technology or mechanic serve more than one isolated moment, and does it belong in the story and level flow? These are analytical questions drawn from the accounts, not a published Naughty Dog scoring system.
Why Uncharted 3 raised the “too many” question
Former Naughty Dog designer Benson Russell recalled a change in how the team approached set pieces. In his account, Uncharted 1 and Uncharted 2 were planned with one or two major spectacles in mind, with story taking priority. He said the Uncharted 2 train was the one set piece devised before development properly began; its technical demands then influenced other uses of moving objects.
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After Uncharted 2’s set pieces succeeded, Russell recalled an Uncharted 3 brainstorm that put “10 or 12” ideas on the board. He expected a later meeting to reduce the list, but said the team instead tried to realize ideas until time or technology forced some aside. That number is his recollection of brainstormed ideas, not an inventory of what shipped. In hindsight, he felt the pursuit of more sequences produced a less even game and forced writer Amy Hennig to accommodate a set piece. His concise verdict was: “I think that was a big flaw, trying to design that way.”
Russell’s interview is a former designer’s retrospective view, not evidence of a studio-wide consensus or a quantified response from players. It does, however, describe a plausible failure mode: when a spectacle becomes a requirement before its story purpose is clear, the narrative may have to bend around it, while production time goes toward making it work.
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Russell’s FRVR interview is listed as published last month in a 2026 search result; the “10 or 12” figure and his interpretation should therefore be understood as recollections, not a contemporaneous production tally.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why the quiet moments matter
High intensity needs contrast. In a GameSpot interview about Uncharted 4, co-writer Josh Scherr said the team wanted more quiet and introspective moments than in earlier games: “We don’t want to stay at 11 the whole time, because it’s exhausting and also where do you go from there?” Scherr—not co-writer Neil Druckmann—is the speaker.
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Naughty Dog’s official description of its GDC 2017 session on Uncharted 4’s cinematic environment production likewise says the team wanted to complement larger-than-life destinations and set pieces with quieter exploration and character-building. Those lower-intensity passages can do different narrative work: give a player time to understand a place, absorb what has happened, or spend time with a character. Quiet is not automatically filler simply because less is exploding.
There is an important counterpoint to the case for restraint. When asked about sequences still coming online late in Uncharted 4, Druckmann said that cutting one and stitching the game around its absence could risk hurting pacing and story. A sequence can be costly and still be structurally important; removing it late is not necessarily a clean way to fix an overloaded game. GameSpot’s interview with Scherr and Druckmann captures both the desire for changing intensity and the risk of late cuts.
How to tell whether a set piece earns its place
“Too many” is not a universal threshold established by these accounts. The more useful question is whether each sequence adds something that its production cost and place in the rhythm can justify. When comparing games or individual scenes, consider:
- Story: Does the event grow from the characters and situation, or does the story seem to have been bent to accommodate it?
- Player control: Does the player remain involved in the spectacle, or does the game mostly ask them to watch?
- Lasting value: Does the sequence develop a mechanic or technology that also supports other moments, as moving-object traversal did in Uncharted 2?
- Rhythm: Does it create a peak that contrasts with nearby exploration or character interaction, or does the game remain at maximum intensity?
- Production fit: Can the team build and polish the sequence with the time available, and is what it contributes worth that effort?
These are questions for analysis, not a formula that proves a game has too many action scenes. The available accounts do not establish a complete exact inventory of each game’s set pieces or measure how often players feel fatigued. Russell offers a specific critical judgment about Uncharted 3; Scherr and Druckmann’s comments help explain why pacing depends on variation and why cutting a scene can carry its own story cost.
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