Fortune hunter Nathan Drake is catapulted headlong into an adventure that takes him on a daring trek into the heart of the Arabian Desert in a search for the fabled 'Atlantis of the Sands.' This journey pits him and his mentor Victor Sullivan against the occult treachery of a shadowy clandestine organization and its ruthless leader. When the terrible secrets of this lost city are unearthed, Drake's quest descends into a desperate bid for survival that strains the limits of his endurance and forces him to confront his deepest fears.
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Creative director Amy Hennig has said the team deliberately went for a desert this time because sand, fire and water are some of the hardest 'organic' elements to fake convincingly with animation. Basically they picked the setting that would force them to get better at the stuff nobody else was doing well yet.
Drake's Deception opens with a quote lifted straight from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the real memoir of T.E. Lawrence (yep, the actual Lawrence of Arabia). His life story, chasing lost cities across the Arabian desert, basically became the blueprint for Nate's own obsession in this game.
If you had a 3D telly back in 2011, Drake's Deception had you covered. It's the first game in the series to fully support high-resolution stereoscopic 3D, letting the sandstorms and collapsing buildings pop out at you a bit more dramatically than usual.
Buy it used back in the day and you'd need to cough up for a PlayStation Network Pass just to get into multiplayer. Uncharted 3 was one of the earliest big titles to lean on this system, which Sony (and pretty much every publisher) quietly dropped a few years later once everyone realised how unpopular it was.
Commercially this one was a monster. Drake's Deception shifted more than nine million copies worldwide, putting it up there among the best-selling games the PS3 ever had.
Critics were basically falling over themselves for this game at the end of 2011. It picked up Game of the Year honours from a huge stack of outlets and award shows, on top of being one of the most decorated titles of that generation.
Katherine Marlowe isn't just some random villain with a grudge, she's the head of a shadowy British order that supposedly traces its roots back to Queen Elizabeth I's own inner circle, including her spymaster Francis Walsingham and the occultist John Dee. That's the whole reason her group has been hunting Iram of the Pillars for centuries before Nate ever showed up.
Nate's family ring isn't just sentimental jewellery, it's actually a key. The whole opening con is built around the fact that an old cipher disk only reveals its hidden message once Sir Francis Drake's ring is slotted into it, which is exactly why both Nate and Marlowe are so desperate to get their hands on it.
The flashback chapters show a teenage Nate, played by Billy Unger, trying to lift the Drake ring from a Cartagena museum and getting way out of his depth. That's the moment Sully steps in, and it's basically the origin story for the whole Drake and Sullivan partnership fans already knew from the earlier games.
Charlie Cutter was originally supposed to stick around for the whole story, but his voice actor Graham McTavish landed a role in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy partway through production. Naughty Dog had to rewrite the back half of the game to write him out, which is why he vanishes from the plot the way he does.
