I have to disagree completely. Actually, I loved the change in 'tactics' (or just having to screw them, if you prefer).

In my opinion, not being able to take cover make sense for monsters because they won't. Also, I really was afraid when the zombies were showing up and just kept firing in every direction I noticed one. Being put into such an unprepared situation was a great deal of the experience for me.

The original Far Cry is renowned for having the same exact problem. For the first half of the game the player is being trained on how to covertly sneak through the jungle in order to find just the right spot to snipe from. The dense brush of the jungle and the large distances are your friends. But then they throw the quick, melee-only Trigens at you and everything about "hiding in the jungle" you'd learned up till then is made null and void to a large extent. For a lot of players (including me), this ended up being a very frustrating experience.

I'm with Michael, I liked the change in style. And I'll go one further, I feel that it was necessary to keep the pacing of the story and the intensity of the moment. Reading this is giving me an awful feeling that designers are going to try and over analyze Uncharted in the way Resistance was over analyzed and stripped of a lot of its character.

Manveer, please remember that gamers that finish games aren't being trained. In the early levels, you're educating us on what we can do. But by mid-game we probably know more about your game than you do. Change it up, challenge us, and overall make it believable.

I got my butt kicked by the monsters at the end the first couple of tries because they created a sense of panic in me and I hadn't yet figured out how to deal with them. Well guess what? I figured out how to deal with them! I used the environment just like I had been all along. I backed in a corner and used the shotgun to maximum effectiveness, I climbed on platforms and led them into narrow hallways.

If anything, you should have given us some new mechanisms to deal with them like environmental traps and escape areas. But forcing a cover system not meant to deal with running enemies on players because that's what we learned early on will have the exact opposite response you are looking for.

Manveer, your "analysis" is really just an opinion. You have failed to support your "design lesson" assertion with any substantive evidence. Instead, you have provided only your own personal experiences with just this game. One person's opinion of just one game, does not provide enough of a basis on which to draw such a general conclusion as you have made.

There's nothing wrong with expressing your opinion, but please don't misrepresent your opinion of one game as if it were a rule of design that might be found in some text book. Instead, it would be better to express your opinion and call for a debate on the subject. Ideally, though, I’d prefer to see a scientific study performed on design hypotheses, like yours.

Personally, my opinion of this design issue more closely matches Michael's opinion. I think that requiring players to significantly change tactics is a potentially useful design choice. I believe it should be done only after the player has had a chance to master the previously learned tactics, and preferably with some sort of warning to the player that their old tactics may no longer be effective. Personally, I've found that mixing up the style-of-play in this manner can mitigate player fatigue.

Lastly, please consider my comments as a criticism of this one article, not as a personal attack.

I agree that changing the strategy of play can be a good thing. However, in my opinon it should be done only when the player has learned the new strategy. From my understanding this is exactly what we're all taking about here, including Manveer.

... "don't make me change the way I play your game completely when you've taught me to play a certain way for the last six hours."

Nowhere does this say that it's ok to change the strategy of play WITHOUT teaching the player the new strategy.

So let's keep our inner monsters at bay and play nice eh.

The worst example I can think of is the final level of Lost Planet where you are expected to go from a ground-based 3rd person shooting experience to some sort of air-based mech experience with slightly different controls while fighting the final boss. There's no time to get used to the new controls and no real explanation as to what you're capable of, or need to do.

There's nothing wrong with changing the way a player plays the game completely, but you can't switch it up without some sort of learning curve. Saying, "oh well if the payer dies once or twice working this out it's ok" is the wrong way to think about it. The player shouldn't die because they're learning, while this will work, why make the player play the same section of game 2-3 times and call it "design" when you can give the player a short introductory sequence and reduce the impact of this shift, without any real reduction in pace.

To use a simple analogy, it's like grabbing a player from Gears of War on hardcore, dropping them in the final levels of Halo on legendary and expecting them to succeed without having any time to experience the different play style. Sadly there are a few games that suffer from this problem.

Darren: If it didn't say anywhere that is was ok "change the strategy of play WITHOUT teaching the player the new strategy", it does now. A hint system would be a given, perhaps by level design. I haven't played Uncharted, but in this case making the architecture surrounding the cover system symmetric, systematic and most importantly different from before. Making the monster rushing against the architecture and destroying it would still suprise the player but it would also be a very strong hint at what does NOT work in this specific situation.

I agree with Michael and others. Changing up how the player has to approach combat keeps the game fresh. Also from a designer's perspective, I find it difficult to intensify the action while maintaining the same patterns/ai routines over the course of a whole game. The only problem Uncharted has in that regard - and it's a minor one - is that the monsters are not introduced properly.

Ironically, switching up the enemy behavior in Uncharted made me enjoy the last hours of the game even more. Normally, I suffer from player fatigue in the last hours of most games, since they just become harder and thus more frustrating. Uncharted is one of the few instances i dind't want it to be over already.