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Naughty Dog: Uncharted’s online and offline would separate without PSN Pass

Uncharted 3 director Justin Richmond has said developer Naughty Dog would need to separate the game’s offline portion if it didn't come with an online pass.

Speaking to TSA, Richmond said Uncharted would have to exist as two separate products - one offline and one online - without it.

Richmond said PSN Pass needs to be part of the package “or we offer online completely in its entirety,” adding that a lack of online fee for used game buyers would result in a “complete offline package as well, so if you want to play the co-op with a friend, you can do that offline."

Online passes have become increasingly prevalent in mainstream games since EA first adopted the Project Ten Dollar system in 2010, forcing buyers of secondhand games to pay a fee to access online play.

THQ, Ubisoft and others have since adopted the scheme.

Sony confirmed at the beginning of this month that it’s to introduce its PSN Pass program into all of its first-party offerings, including UC3.

Richmond further justified Uncharted 3’s online pass with the much-used reason of supporting server costs for used games.

"We give literally thousands of hours of content in our online stuff, and on top of that we give you not just competitive, but an entire co-op experience as well,” he said.

“There’s basically a whole alternate history, alternate version story in our co-op, and in this game they’re actually all tied together. All the co-op missions, of which there are even more, are all actually one continuous story, if you play them in the right order.

"We’re giving out a huge amount of content, and part of the reason for the online pass is that when that stuff goes online, it isn’t free. We have to pay for servers and all this different stuff to maintain it, and so at some point games have to make money. It’s a business, and we just want to be able to continue to provide that kind of content."

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception launches on November 1 in the US and November 2 in the UK for PS3.

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Johnny Cullen

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Johnny has experience at a wide range of games media outlets, having written for Eurogamer, Play Magazine, PC Gamer, GameDaily, and more. He worked at VG247 pumping out news at an astonishing rate for several years. More recently, he founded the games website PlayDiaries.

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