I went hands-on with Naughty Dog's movie-emulating third-person action game Uncharted: Drake's Fortune at this year's PAX. Though the actual demo segments hadn't changed since my hands-on at E3, the developers had implemented some fairly substantial gameplay changes.

SCEA line producer Sam Thompson told me the game was about 80% complete, with the version I played nearly representing that level of completion. Naughty Dog did a mini-overhaul of the combat system, which actually led to much smoother gameplay overall. Hero Nathan Drake exhibits a ridiculous number of layered animations while exploring the jungle environs, making the adventuring gameplay ultrafluid. The last time I played, the combat felt like a jarring and stilted slowdown of the platforming action, so the improvements paid off.

The enhanced controls and targeting made firing from cover or otherwise much more intuitive and accurate, giving even the standard pop-out-and-shoot warfare at least enjoyability, if not an innovative feel. But the enemies did exhibit a weird resistance to death and fairly unrealistic responses to being shot multiple times in the chest or leg.

"We don't want enemies to just be hobbled and never come back to a full run, because then you could just knee-cap everybody and run through and be done with it," Thompson said. That may be true, but the way enemies were reacting to being shot--nursing their wound momentarily, then going into a full sprint toward my character until I shot them, and repeating the cycle--looked pretty unbelievable.

Naughty Dog still has about eight weeks to work on the game to make its holiday release, which Thompson swore it would do. Something not yet integrated in the demo was the destructible crates and cover, which will surely be a nice touch. I'm more hopeful about the title than I originally was, but I still have plenty of doubts. See what Thompson had to say in Naughty Dog's defense.

Shack: What motivated the decision to make Drake's character fairly generic, but not really an everyman or a Lester the Unlikely-type character?

Sam Thompson: Naughty Dog comes from a very iconic background where they had a very noticeable very known, pronounced character. Crash Bandicoot was obviously very recognizable. Jak from Jak and Daxter. Again, another very unique lead character. Very stereotypical--saving the world, heroic, master of all things, born a leader.

What we wanted, and what Naughty Dog really wanted when approaching this story is they wanted something that was a little bit more realistic, a little bit more humble. They were kind of tired of one man that saves the world and is very confident of himself. They wanted a fallible hero. Someone that you could relate to and say, this is possible, I could see somebody like this doing this.

Shack: I'd say he's still kind of a badass. I can't snap people's necks, maybe you can?

Sam Thompson: I don't know. We'll see after the interview [laughs]. I'll give it a shot.

Obviously with a fallible hero you get to situations in video gaming where you can't apply a real life template to that. He's going to do some extraordinary things. But we're going to try to make it somewhat believable and at least try to maintain the most amount of realism as possible in his execution.

Shack: In the demos I played, the traversal sections were fairly linear and didn't seem to require a lot of skill. You just moved Nathan from handhold to handhold and swung on a vine sometimes. How do these sections change later in the game?

Sam Thompson: So what we've done is, we've kind of taken each level as a set piece. And like in Hollywood action movies, each set piece has a unique kind of traversal mechanic or a unique kind of thematical thing about it that makes it similar but unique.

What we do is we look at the environment, we look at the set piece, and what he's interacting with, and the designers have created puzzles and traversal mechanics that are indicative of what you might find in the architecture. You're going to see a lot of variation.

Obviously Naughty Dog does puzzles very well. They're a platforming group by nature. So you're going to see some things that are very relevant in comparison to the way Jak and Daxter may traverse a level. But what we're trying to do is add a lot of variation to the way he does it.

Go to page 2 for the scoop on in-game cinematics, NPC interaction, and combat.