Uncharted franchise hits 17 million units sold

Good to see sales are high, its a great series. Hope The Last of Us can match the quality and sales and maybe revive a bit the survival horror genre and show Capcom that you can mix action and horror without ditching survival horror elements.

Posted:A year ago

I would say that Capcom never abandoned horror with Resident Evil, but they did put the survival bit to the side. Some people might argue that you can't have one without the other, but there's a distinct genre of "action horror" titles which aren't often frightening but still have a lot of elements of horror.

Posted:A year ago

I agree with your comment David, although the horror elements aren't as effective when you're touting a grenade launcher and shotgun with 32 shells.

I hope The Last of Us does indeed have a lot of emphasis on Survival Horror rather than just being an action game which happens to have 'not zombies' in it. Regardless, really looking forward to it and Naughty Dog haven't disappointed me yet. (Well, maybe Jak 2 a little).

Anyway, really glad to see good sales figures for the Uncharted series, although I would be interested to see a breakdown for this. If total Vita sales stood at 1.2 million a few weeks back then I guess Golden Abyss might stand at about 600k sales, with the three PS3 iterations making up the rest. Which probably means Uncharted 1 & 2 have upward of six million sales each, at a rough guess - very impressive numbers, and glad to see Sony's investment in new IPs this generation is working out in the long term.

One thing though; I still don't understand why Sony don't put some PS3 classics on the PSN Store for in the region of £8-£12 apiece - games like Uncharted: DF, Heavenly Sword, MotorStorm PR, Folklore, Ratchet & Clank: TOD, etc. Surely their retail sales have all-but-flatlined, so it seems logical to offer them direct to customers at a fair price. In fact, I think they should do that with all Platinum/Greatest Hits releases, but I expect that would piss off some retailers, so maybe wait until the game has been re-released for two or three months before putting them up for a download at a price which matches or betters the retail price.

Posted:A year ago

If anything, Resident Evil and Silent Hill suffered from us knowing what we were doing. The more you play one type of game, the more you are able to dominate it right from the start. The same is true for any action game, the problem being that those do not hinge on a player's lack of aptitude.

Posted:A year ago

I think one of the main challenges of doing real horror is the fact that it implies a bit of helplessness for the player. After all, you can make an enemy as scary looking as you want, but if you can dispatch it will relative ease, it's not really that horrifying. Some of the more compelling takes on horror recently have relied upon the player either having to avoid or hide from monsters altogether, so it takes the problem of being an action game out of the equation.

Posted:A year ago