#dynamic difficulty

Uncharted 1 Punished You for Playing Too Well

Benson Russell, former game designer at Naughty Dog on the first three Uncharted games and The Last of Us, revealed on the FRVR podcast an inglorious mechanic in Nathan Drake's debut: dynamic difficulty designed not to balance the experience, but to artificially slow down the fastest players to compensate for insufficient content. A rare admission about the inner workings of a studio otherwise renowned for its mastery of narrative pacing.