It was this or Battlefront, and ehhh....
I'd never played an Uncharted game before, but I'd heard a lot about the series. I'd heard that it was super cinematic, that the traversal elements set the standard for an entire generation...and that the protagonist is a mass-murdering sociopath.
Yeah, I don't know why it is that this game series got singled out so hard, but I feel like it frequently gets brought up as an example of tonal dissonance in game combat. Basically, it's come to serve as a stand-in for every game where your protagonist is a one-man army mowing through hundreds of throwaway goons on the way from Point A to Point B. If I had to guess why Uncharted is the go-to, I'd say it's because Nathan Drake really straddles the line of likability at the best of times, at least from what I've seen so far. He's a smug bastard, so I guess I can understand the reflexive instinct to take his little power-trip down a peg. Still, something seemed off...
So as I started playing Uncharted, I decided to pay special attention to the combat and see if it really did bother me or take me out of the experience. But...no. As I played the game, nothing really terrible jumped out at me. It pretty much felt like every other shooter. You had your cutscenes where the actual story happened, then your fight scenes where Armed Thugs #122-#145 roll in the door to exchange bullets with you. Pretty standard. Intellectually, I understood that what I was doing was completely unrealistic, and yet nothing was really taking me out of the experience in a visceral way.
I did a lot of thinking about this, coming at it from a very different angle than a lot of thinkpieces I'd been seeing on the subject of game combat. I wanted to figure out just why I, and presumably many others, so readily accept such unrealistic combat structures, and why they seemingly don't detract from the story being told. And...I came up with a solution. I warn you, this analogy might change the way you look at game combat forever, but I think I found the cover-shooter's closest cousin among all other media.
Okay, here's my theory: Combat sequences in action games are like musical numbers in musicals.
Some games make this analogy easier than others.
I want you to think about musicals for a second. In some musicals, songs are meant to exist definitively in-universe. When characters are singing, they are literally singing. Maybe it's part of a show-within-a-show or just a jam session between the leads, but it's supposed to be actual singing like people would do in real life. But, that's not most musicals.
In most musicals, musical numbers are just kind of a...thing...that happens. At a certain moment, the band kicks in, the lights go down and suddenly the characters have started to express themselves through song rather than words. And when it's over? No explanation. Reality just goes back to normal, or however normal the baseline of the show is. No one stops to ask why everyone started singing or how everyone knew the words, and when they do it's more of a self-aware nod to the audience than an actual reflection on the reality of the fiction.
Musical numbers in musicals are an abstraction. They're a point at which the reality of the fiction becomes less real in service of the fiction being what it is. Every form of media and storytelling has its own unique sets of abstractions that serve this purpose. It's the reason you never ask to see the fourth wall of a sit-com family's house. It's the reason you don't notice when movie conversations aren't filled with all the pauses, corrections and stutters of normal human speech. It's the reason you accept sound effects in space battles and pulsing soundtracks when there's no physical band visible behind the hero. In many little ways, every form of media presents an abstracted, adjusted and cropped version of reality, and they do so to allow for what their medium is capable of doing.
In a musical, when a character is singing, what you're seeing is an abstract version of absolute reality. The emotions of the moment have taken over the physical space you're seeing. If you want to dig into the "reality," you could say that what you're seeing is an artistic heightening of what is actually a very flat conversation between the characters or of thoughts within a character's mind. Now, obviously it's boring to think about musical numbers in these terms, which is why most of us don't. Many of us just accept the musical numbers as being there because...well...that's what musicals are. Hell, that's what you came to see. It's suspension of disbelief!
I would argue that combat sequence in games, especially as games like Uncharted do it, are very similar. For the purpose of the story, all that ever matters in these moments is "A fight happened." The specific body count and number of bullets lodged in Nathan Drake's abdomen over the course of the battle don't matter, because those are all a gameplay abstraction of what the game is communicating to you. Really examine the dialogue and the storytelling being done in these moments. Attention is always pulled towards the general rather than the specific. Nathan Drake might throw out a quip like "Man, these guys just keep coming," but never "I've killed twenty men just now. How many more must die?" That's the dialogue signposting where the story ends and the abstractions for the purpose of gameplay begin.
If you asked most people why shooters have shooting sequences in them, the response you'd get is probably "Well, it wouldn't be a shooter without them." That may sound like a cop-out in the moment, but think about it in the musical context. That's basically the exact same justification one would give for musical numbers in most musicals. It's just...not a musical without them! Musicals have music so people can engage with the story while hearing music. Shooters have shooting so players can be part of the action through the interactive loop of shooting.
And furthermore, that's fine. Games need to be allowed to be abstract for the purpose of being interactive. Why? Because the alternative is a goddamn nightmare.
Yeah, laugh it up, but let's think about this.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard the complaint "Oh, it totally takes me out of the game whenever they mention the controls." To this, I really wonder what the alternative is. Would you rather the game simply not tell you the controls? Because it's really one or the other, and the only third option would be to limit yourself to games in which the physical controls are somehow an in-universe construct. Like, say...it could maybe be a space-shooter where spaceship's control panel is literally a replica of the controller in your hand? Then, it wouldn't be abstract. But, that's really damn limiting. If I'm playing as a teenage lesbian in 1960s London who's coming to terms with her father's drinking problem, there is no context in which the phrase "Press A to Interact" isn't going to highlight the abstraction of the game a bit...but I'd still prefer knowing how to interact with stuff.
Limiting yourself to stories that are free of abstraction is limiting your self to way too few stories.
"So hold up, Alex, did we go through all this just so you could tell people to suspend their disbelief?"
No. At least, not quite. My point here is not to invalidate the criticisms people have leveled against Uncharted or any other games of that type. If the rampant shootiness really does break the fiction for you, that's a valid way to receive the game. It's obviously not my personal interpretation, but hey, you do you.
No, what I wanted to do was unpack why these elements aren't a problem for so many other people. See, fiction as an abstraction of reality is always kind of a tricky thing to justify because...well...it's irrational. On a purely intellectual level, yes, the amount of gunmurder in the Uncharted series is absurd bordering on harrowing. However, appreciating it as abstraction taps into something a little more subconscious. I imagine for most people, expressing in words why these sequences do work for them would be difficult. You'd probably get something like "It's just a game," or the aforementioned "It wouldn't be a game without it." But when you really examine them, these statements are deceptively deep, or at least imperfectly hint at a deeper truth about storytelling in games. It's abstraction for the purpose of interaction. It's "fight" expressed as "shooting gallery."
So really...no, I don't see anything wrong with those sequences. Uncharted is telling a story interactively and giving the player points of interaction at which to contribute. It's not realistic, but it's not trying to be reality. It's trying to gamify these situations into something with which the player can simply and intuitively interact. It's something we should be embracing as a unique facet of how games communicate moments through interactive actions, rather than forcing these moments to be 1:1 with reality in an effort to put them in-line with more non-interactive storytelling. It's the identity of games. It's what, in a very real way, makes them a unique form of art. It's...beautiful.
...But all that being said, Uncharted's combat kind of sucks, too.
