1UP: Can you talk about where the story takes Nathan, location-wise?
EW: You start in Turkey, and then go through Borneo, Nepalese cities, and then mountains in Tibet and the Himalayas, and more.
AH: Actually, Nepal and onward are pretty much "in realtime." While early on, and in the last game, there were transition cut-scenes to mark the passage of time between locations. Once you reach Nepal, when it comes time to go to Tibet, you actually play through the journey to Tibet. So we have levels that model the transition between locations.
EW: Let me touch on one of those transition levels: we have you go on a train. In fact, the train fight is the first thing we started with after completing Uncharted. In most games, a train level is simply a stationary area with the background moving all around you. We didn't want that, and we started early on and created enough real estate to have an actual moving train. Once we had the moving train, then we could do the things we wanted in a train level; it could go up hills or twist around bends. A lot of Uncharted 2's systems, like collapsing buildings, came from the train level.
------
holy poop
