[QUOTE="charizard1605"] Yes, I agree. Almost every game these days has bad level design. I don't care about the action, I don't care that the cinematic cutscenes had me guessing at what was going to happen, I care that the game confounded me and immersed me in the one way that only a game truly can, and that is by making me guess what to do next and where to go now. Uncharted never did that. Everything you did was always clear. Again, for level design, play something like Half Life 2 or Crysis or Metroid Prime or Super Mario Galaxy 2. THAT is level design. Not a single 'corridor' (even if the corridor is disguised as 'the outdoors') that forces you to move from point A to B.Rekunta
Don't mean to butt-in, but I'd like to point something out here.
For what Uncharted 2 aims to acheive,with its fast paced, cinematic, by the seat of your pants adrenaline soaked experience, its level design is quite brilliant. The levels are presented in such a way that is most conducive to conveying to the player as much of a cinematic experience as possible, and in that respect ND accomplished what they set out to do with flying colors. Your argument about not being able to explore here or there or go wherever you want as an indication of poor level design is completely unfounded, irrelevant and innaccurate. For the type of game they created, the level design is astoundingly well done and fitting. You're holding UC up to the likes of Metroid, SMG2 and others....those are games that have entirely different goals from one another, they cannot be compared as their objectives are vastly different from UC's. Besides, you can have terrible level design in a non-linear game.
Jumping out of a window of a collapsing building that has just been blown up by a helicopter into another adjacent building, clambering and fighting your way up a train dodging obstacles (and then battling a helicopter later on from a railcar), the Nepalese villiage. All of these were brilliantly designed levels, because they worked incredibly well towards what the game was trying to do: build up tension and provide atmosphere to give the player a one of a kind cinematic gaming experience. Allowing you to wander off the set path was not how it was intended, and it doesn't inherently mean this linearity automatically makes it inferior to games that do allow more freedom. It's simply different. SMG2 has excellent level design for a platformer. Super Metroid does for an open world/adventure game. And, yes, Uncharted 2 also does for providing what basically amounts to playing an interactive, tightly scripted movie.
And I see no correlation between linearity, interactivity, and whether a level is done well or not. All three can work equally effectively in various combinations. Again, it all depends on what the game is trying to do. And for what UC2 strives for, it excels at, precisely because of the design of its levels. They are anything but poorly done, they are what made the game. You need to ask yourself what the game is trying to accomplish before you start deciding whether the level design is poor or not.
Yes, I agree with this guy. One quick thought from me, if not for Uncharted, we app would be wishing for something like it. I say gamers got lucky that the goal that Uncharted 2 was going for was done so well. 
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