After days of cries that the aiming in Uncharted 3 is rather off and counterproductive, Naughty Dog community manager Arne Meyer has stepped up and addressed players via the Naughty Dog forums and even asked for volunteers from NeoGAF to come to their studio in Santa Monica, CA to speak with employees and test out an upcoming patch that will supposedly fix the aiming and add the motion blur effect, which is missing from the retail release of the game. Two NeoGAF users, CartridgeBlower and AwesomeSauce, stepped up to the plate and you can read their feedback on the NeoGAF link above.
As nice as it would be to have this kind of oversight prevented and observed before the final product ships, it’s also nice to see the studio actively seek out opinions, suggestions, and having a dialogue about a potential problem.
You can also read Meyer’s article concerning what Naughty Dog set out to achieve with the single-player aiming in his post on Naughty Dog’s official site. In it, he says that the concern was accuracy, that weapons now fire directly from the barrel of a gun and its recoil must be taken into consideration as opposed to being fired from certain angles and missing by a wide margin. He also says the aiming is “identical” to the second game, which is flat out untrue. I’m not sure what exactly the post is talking about. I tested out the differences of the aiming between Uncharted 2 and 3 and I had absolutely no issue hitting targets with an AK47. Speaking of which, Naughty Dog also sought to weaken the distance of the weapon since many players supposedly used it too much for their liking.
I played a little of Chapter 4 in Uncharted 2 and the way Drake moves the targeting reticule is absolutely responsive to my input on the analog stick. Uncharted 3 is slow, even after a significant sensitivity increase and not as responsive. What players might not see is the inner reticule that expands and shrinks depending on a weapon’s recoil as part of its aim assist. Regardless, Naughty Dog has acted on the issue and I was still able to finish Uncharted 3 on Normal difficulty. While the aiming is undoubtedly better in part two, I honestly did get used to Uncharted 3‘s system towards the end.
