Gamasutra has published yet another enlightening postmortem, this one centering on the development of Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Many topics are covered, though the most interesting one, as Joystiq also points out, is that of Maria Chase, the game's female lead.
One of the biggest challenges was making Marisa likable. Initially the developers were quite confident that players would fall in love with her. Maria's voice actress (Christine Lakin) was spot on in her portrayal, plus her physical actress (via motion capture) was equally superb. So why did focus testers hate her so much?
It was the writing. On one hand, Marisa's constant sarcastic and smart-alecky comments won her no favors. According to John Garvin, writer and director of the game:
"What's that old adage? If a man acts forceful he's 'take-charge and aggressive, a real leader' but if a woman acts that way, she's being 'pushy and a bitch' — an unfair gender stereotype, but one we had to deal with."
How so? By making her less aggressive, less judgmental. Not helping was how Drake was constantly annoyed with his new partner, which apparently rubbed off on players. If the star of the show thought Marisa was annoying, the players (since they are one and the same) felt the same way as well.
Not helping was how Maria came off as a wimp as well, and in retrospect, Garvin fully understands why:
"For gameplay reasons, we constantly put Chase into situations where Drake needed to take action. Call it lazy if you want, but we ended up with a few 'Princess Peach' scenarios… It seemed that poor Chase was constantly being choked, shot at, knocked out, dragged around and kidnapped. We fixed that, as well as we could, by changing the scenarios to make Chase less of a victim."
In the end, it would seem that Garvin was successful in turning Maria around, though more than a few have wondered why he simply didn't have a female writer lend a helping hand. Especially when even a female colleague had warned him in advance that his initial approach might potentially backfire (which it did).
