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Uncharted 3 Multiplayer Modes Revealed, Beta Announced

by Adam Cook on April 18, 2011

What a way to start the week! First of all, we give away 15 Gears of War 3 beta codes, and now this! The multiplayer modes for Uncharted 3 have just been revealed over at the official Sony PlayStation Blog!

We have even more than that for you you though, including a new trailer for the title and details of the newly announced multiplayer beta!

We revealed two of our new competitive modes, along with the perennial favorite Team Deathmatch. One is Three Team Deathmatch, which is a small-team 2 vs. 2 vs. 2 variation on Team Deathmatch. The other is the oft-requested Free For All – with every player out for themselves. Over the months left until release – that’s about six-and-a-half months if you’re counting – we’ll detail all of our competitive modes.

As you’re looking to get into matches, we’ve made some updates to make it easier to get into games quicker, and with your friends. The first is Late Join, which is a staple of many online games and for good reason. It ensures that matches stay full, that you can get into matches faster and you can get into your friends matches faster if there’s a slot for you, instead of waiting for your friend to finish their current round. We’ve heard that many of you want to play with a friend on the same couch and we’re really proud to say that we were able to not only implement same-console split screen but you can log into two independent PSN IDs for most gametypes – the ones you can’t are to prevent unfair collusion between players.

Playing with friends and creating a team environment is extremely important for us and we’re trying to encourage this with the Buddy system. Each player will be partnered with a Buddy and you’ll be able to collectively share your successes throughout the match with each other. You can even pick up Treasures — more on that later — for your Buddy. The Buddy system also allows you to choose to spawn on your Buddy if they are safely out of combat so you can jump into the action together quicker. This is key since most of our game modes are all about team play and teams that stick together will do far better than teams who don’t.

New to Uncharted 3 multiplayer is character customization. Both heroes and villains skins will have a hundreds of customizable parts, from accessories to shirts and pants to a deep weapon customization feature. Even named characters, like Drake or Sully, will get plenty of options to make your character your own. Hand in hand with customization is our emblem editor. If you’ve worked with emblem editors in other games, you’ll be pretty familiar with the one we’ve implemented in Uncharted 3. Our emblem editor extends the level of customization of your online profile with hundreds of decals, three layers, rotate and scale functions – you’ll see your final emblem on your character and even possibly in the environment during matches.

Speaking of weapon customizations – it goes beyond the cosmetic. We have weapon mods that not only change the look of your weapon of choice, but they are functional too, adding precise scopes, bigger clips and more!

Boosters are back in Uncharted 3, but we didn’t just carry over the Booster selection from Uncharted 2. There are a few old favorites in there, but we’ve created what we feel is a more satisfying mix of old and new based on your feedback and selection patterns. We’ve extended the Booster system with a special subset of Paid Boosters, give you a one-time Booster that you spend some cash to have the option of using during a match. There are still other ways to get minor advantages during a match. You have to option to select a specific Medal Kickback, which activates when you’ve racked up the required number of Medals for that specific Kickback. You can see this in the Multiplayer Trailer when the RPG Kickback is activated at 00:50 into the video. You’re taking a little chance when you select these, as some really choice Kickbacks require you to get a significant number of Medals before you can activate them.

Those are a TON of customization options you can pick through and we know that you don’t want to be bogged down in menus in the limited time before the match begins trying to figure out which sets of customizations you want to slot for that match. We’ve introduced four slots to save specific loadouts — your starting rifle, starting sidearm, weapon customizations and mods, Boosters, and Kickbacks.

All of these customization and modifier options allowed us to extend our in-game reward system. No longer is everything tied to level gain or cash. During matches, you’ll have the opportunity to get items from treasure chests on the maps. You’ll also be able unlock a wide variety of items and modifiers through Missions. There are two types of Missions – some are instant missions and others, accessible from the Multiplayer menu, are more long term. Instant missions can appear in the middle of a match and provide a target that you can complete within a few matches tops. The Missions you select from the Multiplayer menu will take significantly more time, days of playtime possibly, and the rewards will be accordingly more significant.

A couple of things we’ve learned over the past year and a half of reviewing thousands upon thousands of Uncharted 2 matches is that it really sucks to be blown out on the way to losing a match and that winning or losing a tightly contested match by some kill made way off-screen is a bit of a letdown. We’ve thought of some ways to make these inevitable multiplayer moments a bit more exciting and satisfying. Power Plays activate when one team is way behind in the score count. They provide the team on top with an opportunity to maximize their cash for the match, while evening the odds a little for the team on the losing end of the equation and giving them the opportunity to close the gap a little.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about competitive multiplayer, but what about co-op? Fear not, co-op is most definitely IN Uncharted 3 multiplayer and it too has been vastly expanded upon. We didn’t cover anything co-op related at our multiplayer event last week – everything and anything co-op will be revealed further down the line.

When can you get a crack at Uncharted 3 multiplayer? In just a couple of months – the Multiplayer Beta for Uncharted 3 begins WORLDWIDE on June 28, 2011, with early access for PlayStation Plus members or by purchasing copies of Infamous 2.