Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception sends Nathan Drake into the Arabian Desert with a stolen ring, a mentor he cannot trust and a secret society that has been chasing the same myth for four centuries. Naughty Dog built it for the PlayStation 3 in 2011, and it remains the most ambitious of the studio’s desert epics.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
A London Pub, Counterfeit Notes, and a Ring
The game opens in a London pub. Nate and Victor “Sully” Sullivan meet Talbot, a man interested in buying Nate’s ring — the one inherited from Sir Francis Drake. Nate and Sully accuse Talbot of paying with counterfeit banknotes. A fight follows. Talbot’s thugs lose. Then Charlie Cutter, Talbot’s cohort, subdues both men in an alley, and Katherine Marlowe arrives to take the ring. Cutter shoots Nate and Sully down.
The shooting is a fake. Cutter is an ally. That reversal lands early, and Uncharted 3 spends the rest of its running time earning it back.
Cartagena, Colombia, Twenty Years Earlier
The story cuts to a teenage Nate, played by Billy Unger, exploring a museum in Cartagena, Colombia, hunting for the ring. Guards throw him out. He spots Sully, follows him to a keymaker, pickpockets him, then returns to the museum and steals the ring. Marlowe catches him with her henchmen. Sully, working for Marlowe at that point, rescues Nate and takes him on as a protégé.
This flashback is the spine of the whole game. Nolan North plays the adult Nate, and Richard McGonagle plays Sully, and the two of them carry a relationship that the Cartagena sequence explains without ever over-explaining it.
The Underground Library and Francis Drake’s Voyage
With Chloe Frazer, played by Claudia Black, the group traces Marlowe to an underground library. They find a map of Francis Drake’s voyage to Arabia. Queen Elizabeth I commissioned that voyage to find the lost city of Ubar. Clues to its location sit in Crusader crypts in a French chateau and a Syrian citadel.
Nate and Sully find the chateau and one half of an amulet. Talbot and his men ambush them, take the amulet and set the chateau on fire. Nate and Sully escape.
In Syria, they meet Chloe and Cutter again. Marlowe, they learn, heads the same secret society Francis Drake belonged to. The second amulet half points to Yemen. Marlowe, Talbot and their henchmen find them first. Cutter breaks his leg during the escape, and he and Chloe drop out.
In Yemen, Nate and Sully reunite with Elena Fisher, played by Emily Rose — Nate’s estranged wife.
What Uncharted 3 Asks You to Do
The game is an action-adventure platformer played from a third-person perspective. Drake has a large number of animation sets, so he reacts to his surroundings rather than gliding through them. He jumps, sprints, climbs, swims and scales narrow ledges and wall faces.
Combat got wider. Drake can:
- fight hand-to-hand against multiple opponents
- use contextual melee attacks
- take enemies out with stealth, including one-hit kills from behind
- drop onto an enemy while hanging from a ledge
He carries up to two firearms — one single-handed, one two-handed — and four grenades. He picks up weapons off downed enemies, replacing whatever he was holding, and pulls ammunition from the same bodies. Cover works from corners or low walls, with aimed or blind fire. He can shoot while moving.
The stealth system is simplified and improved, which is the right call. Puzzles run through Drake’s journal, which holds the clues. A hint system, when switched on, points toward the next objective.
Deserts, Cities, and T. E. Lawrence
Naughty Dog started development in 2010. The team wanted locations distinct from the earlier games and settled on deserts and urban areas. For the plot, the studio drew on the life of archaeologist T. E. Lawrence.
That choice shows. Uncharted 3 is not a game about a lost city so much as a game about men who spend their lives chasing one and what it costs them. The team increased the volume of motion capture and voice acting, and did field research for better visual environments and sounds.
Multiplayer got a rebuild, with new competitive and co-operative modes. The game also shipped as one of the first to carry the online PlayStation Network Pass.
A Release Calendar of Sorts
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2009 | Among Thieves ships; Drake’s Deception is set two years after it |
| 2010 | Development begins at Naughty Dog |
| 2011 | Drake’s Deception releases on PlayStation 3 |
A 9.3, and Why the Desert Matters
Drake’s Deception drew acclaim for its voice acting, graphics, story and cinematic quality. Some critics knocked its linearity and called it weaker than Among Thieves. It won Game of the Year honors from numerous publications and award events, and it sold over nine million copies.
The linearity complaint is the one worth arguing with. Uncharted 3 is linear on purpose. The chateau fire, the Syrian citadel, the Yemen streets — these are set pieces built to be run through, not wandered. The game’s best ideas are about momentum and the fear of losing it.
Where it genuinely slips is in the middle. The amulet halves, the crypts, the library — the plot moves pieces around a board and asks you to care about a map. The Cartagena flashback and the London pub are sharper because they are about people. The treasure hunt is the excuse.
What holds is the pairing. North and McGonagle have been doing this since the first game, and the Cartagena sequence gives their dynamic a history the earlier entries only implied. When Sully rescues a teenage thief from Marlowe’s agents and decides to raise him, the game tells you everything about why the adult Nate keeps dragging Sully into worse and worse places.
The multiplayer is the part that has aged least gracefully, and the PlayStation Network Pass is a relic of a specific moment in console online infrastructure. Neither is why anyone remembers this game.
The desert is. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception takes a fortune hunter into the Arabian Desert chasing the “Atlantis of the Sands,” and when the lost city’s secrets surface, the quest turns into a fight to survive that strains Drake’s endurance and forces him to face his deepest fears. That is the promise the game makes in its opening hour, and it is the promise it keeps.
9.3 of 10.
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