Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is a 2009 action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 3. It is the second game in the Uncharted series. Set two years after Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007), the story follows Nathan Drake, Chloe Frazer and Elena Fisher as they search for the Cintamani Stone and Shambhala while battling a militia led by Serbian war criminal Zoran Lazarević.
Development for Uncharted 2 began immediately following the success of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. The development team drew inspiration from explorer Marco Polo and his expeditions through archipelagos and eastern Asia. Naughty Dog developed an updated proprietary engine for Among Thieves, which runs exclusively on the Naughty Engine 2.0 system. These improvements enabled extensive motion capture, greater in-game cinematic sequences, and inclusion of an online multiplayer component, a first for the franchise.
Among Thieves received acclaim for its narrative, voice acting, graphics, technical achievements, and cinematic quality. It received Game of the Year accolades from numerous publications and award events, and is considered one of the most significant games for the seventh console generation and amongst the greatest video games ever made. It sold more than six million copies worldwide, and was re-released on PlayStation 4 as part of Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection. A sequel, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, was released in 2011.
Gameplay
Uncharted 2 is an action-adventure platform video game played from a third-person view, with the player in control of Nathan Drake. Drake is physically adept and can jump, climb, and scale narrow ledges and wall faces to get between points. Drake can be equipped with up to two firearms – one single-handed and one two-handed – and a limited supply of grenades. Drake can pick up weapons, automatically replacing the existing weapon he was using, and additional ammunition from slain enemies. The player can direct Drake to take cover behind corners or low walls using either aimed or blind-fire to kill his enemies. The player can also have Drake fire while moving. If Drake is undetected by his enemies, the player can attempt to use stealth to take them out, such as by sneaking up behind them to knock them out with one hit, or by pulling an unsuspecting foe over a ledge from which Drake is hanging. Some areas of the game require the player to solve puzzles with the use of Drake's journal, which provides clues to the puzzles' solutions. When enabled, a hint system provides gameplay clues, such as the direction of the next objective.
Throughout the game are 100 special treasures and one secret relic that may be hidden or in difficult-to-reach places that the player can collect. Collecting these treasures, along with completing certain feats within the game, is tracked by the awarding of medals, which give the player in-game money to use to unlock extra content on the disc, including concept art, game movies, and game cheats such as guns with infinite ammunition. A large portion of the in-game medals is used to award trophies.
Multiplayer Uncharted features both competitive and co-operative multiplayer. The co-op multiplayer allows a maximum of three players to take the roles of Nathan and two other "hero" companions and features missions involving gunfights, platforming, and teamwork-based objectives. Players can also assist their comrades if they become critically injured or if they are grabbed by an enemy.
The competitive multiplayer allows a maximum of ten players to play against each other in two teams of five. Six competitive modes are featured: Deathmatch, Plunder, Elimination, Turf War, King of the Hill and Chain Reaction. Deathmatch features two teams of five, with one team acting as heroes and the other as villains. Players can choose their own appropriate character models (such as Nathan, Elena, Sully, and new characters Tenzin and Chloe for the heroes team). As players accrue points and rank up, they can purchase more skins for both heroes and villains. Players can select two Boost abilities that assist them in the matches. Plunder is similar to the traditional capture the flag game mode, and sees each team attempt to capture the treasure from a central point in the map and return it to their base; the player carrying the treasure is slowed down a great deal, and may also choose to hurl the treasure away at any point, to keep it out of reach of the enemy or to pass it to a teammate. Elimination has two teams of five players against each other to kill everyone on the other team. In Elimination, the players do not respawn. The goal is to eliminate the other team three out of five times.
Chain Reaction is a mode that is similar to Turf War. This has the player capturing posts, but the player must do them in a specific order – one team works out from their base needing to capture 1 through 5 while the other team starts from their home and needs to snag 5 through 1. King of the Hill has players capturing a hill, spawned on the map to score points. They must stay on the hill to score points while the enemy team tries to do the same.
Gold Rush is a cooperative mode of play where 2–3 players must team up to obtain a treasure, which is randomly spawned on the map, and take it back to their base, much like Plunder. However, AI enemies try to stop the players from returning the treasure. If a player goes down and is not revived before the timer goes out, they will not come back until the next round. In each consecutive round, the enemies become tougher to defeat. Survival is the second cooperative mode of play, where 2–3 players must work together to defeat a total of ten waves of enemies, each wave becoming more and more difficult. In the new co-op game mode, "Siege", players team up to secure a zone while holding off waves of enemies. The multiplayer servers of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves were terminated on September 3, 2019.
Plot Two years after the events of the first game, treasure hunter Nathan "Nate" Drake (Nolan North) is approached by former associate Harry Flynn (Steve Valentine) and Flynn's associate Chloe Frazer (Claudia Black) to help steal a Mongolian oil lamp connected to Italian explorer Marco Polo's doomed 1292 voyage from China. The group plans to cheat Flynn's client and take Polo's treasure for themselves. Unbeknownst to Flynn, Chloe and Nate are former partners, and Chloe plans on escaping with Nate afterward. Nate and Flynn break into a museum in Istanbul and find the lamp, which contains a map and flammable resin that reveals Polo's fleet was shipwrecked in Borneo, and was carrying the Cintamani Stone from the fabled city of Shambhala. Flynn double-crosses Nate, leaving him to be arrested.
Three months later, Chloe helps free Nate with his long-term friend Victor "Sully" Sullivan (Richard McGonagle). She reveals that Flynn is working for Zoran Lazarević (Graham McTavish), a Serbian war criminal seeking the stone. In Borneo, Nate and Sully infiltrate Lazarević's camp, with Chloe as a mole. Nate discovers that the stone never left Shambhala. They locate a temple containing the bodies of Polo's crew, as well as a phurba and map detailing that its carrier will gain passage to Shambhala through a temple in Nepal. Nate and Sully escape after being cornered by Flynn and his men.
Sully backs out, so Nate and Chloe continue to Nepal, which has been ravaged by Lazarević's mercenaries. They encounter Nate's ex-girlfriend journalist Elena Fisher (Emily Rose) and cameraman Jeff (Gregory Myhre), tracking Lazarević. At the temple, Nate and Chloe use the phurba to uncover Shambhala's location in the Himalayas. After Jeff is shot in an ambush, Chloe insists on abandoning him; Nate and Elena help him but are caught by Lazarević. Chloe switches sides to maintain her cover while Lazarević kills Jeff and obtains Shambhala's location from Nate, who escapes with Elena.
With Elena's help, Nate catches up to Lazarević's train. He fights through it to find Chloe, but she refuses to leave after he compromised their mission to help Jeff and Elena. Flynn arrives and shoots Nate. Cornered, Nate causes an explosion that derails the train over a cliff. He escapes the hanging train car, recovers the phurba, and falls unconscious. A Tibetan Sherpa, Tenzin (Pema Dhondup), brings Nate to his village.
Nate reunites with Elena and is introduced to German explorer, Karl Schäfer (René Auberjonois). Schäfer sends him and Tenzin after the remains of Schäfer's failed expedition for the Cintamani Stone decades ago. Nate and Tenzin travel through ice caves and fight off strange monsters. They discover that Schäfer was working for the Nazi Ahnenerbe and killed his men to protect the world from the stone. They return to repel an attack on the village by Lazarević, who kidnaps Schäfer and steals the phurba. Elena and Nate follow Lazarević's convoy to a monastery, where the mortally wounded Schäfer warns Nate to destroy the stone before Lazarević can obtain its power.
After reacquiring the phurba from Chloe, Nate and Elena unlock the secret passage to Shambhala underneath the monastery, but Lazarević corners them. With Chloe's cover blown, Lazarević forces Nate to open the pathway to Shambhala. The monsters attack but are killed by Lazarević, who reveals them as human-like guardians of Shambhala. After the gate is opened, unsuited guardians attack, allowing Nate, Elena, and Chloe to escape.
In the city, the group discovers that the Cintamani Stone is a giant amber derived, along with the flammable resin, from the sap of an ancient tree of life. The sap gives the drinker inhuman powers, explaining the guardians and Polo's doomed crew. Flynn, left for dead by Lazarević, ambushes them in a suicide attack, seriously wounding Elena. Nate leaves her in Chloe's care and confronts Lazarević at the tree. Lazarević drinks the tree sap, becoming nearly invincible. By shooting explosive pockets of resin, Nate defeats Lazarević and leaves him to be killed by the guardians. As the city crumbles under the collapse of the tree and exploding resin, Nate and Chloe carry Elena to safety.
In the village, Chloe advises Nate to tell Elena that he loves her, before bidding him farewell. Sully leaves a recovering Elena to Nate. The couple pays their respects at a memorial for Schäfer and kiss.
Development First revealed by Game Informer in December 2008, the first teaser trailer showed a weary, wounded Nathan Drake marching through a snowstorm to reach a phurba half-buried in the snow. Lead character artist Richard Diamant remarked that the trailer was rendered in real-time, using the game's engine. A second teaser trailer was released soon after, showing a badly wounded Drake stuck in the remains of a wrecked train hanging precariously over a cliff. The story begins in medias res with this opening. The narrative opens with a quote attributed to Marco Polo: "I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed".
The game had three main writers: head writer Amy Hennig, Neil Druckmann and Josh Scherr.
Uncharted 2 features an online multiplayer component; Naughty Dog hired a dedicated multiplayer designer in August 2008 to work on this aspect of the game. The beta phase of the multiplayer was playable by those who bought early copies of the game inFamous. The beta was also accessible by annual subscribers of the PlayStation Network service, Qore, on June 3, to those who had subscribed to Qore by May 15. The beta codes from Qore began to be sent out on May 8, 2009. Beta codes from inFamous shipped inside the game's packaging, on May 26. On September 15, another beta was released and an open beta was released to the EU and US on September 29 via the PSN store. Both expired on October 12. In the first year since the game's launch, more than 125 million matches and 10,500 man-years had been played online.