Headscratchers / Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

• So, is Talbot ever going to be explained at all? His drug-induced hallucinations are vaguely plausible, even given how specific they are, but what about his apparent immunity to bullets? And why can he teleport right after drugging Charlie but not when Drake's chasing him?
  • The way I saw it, by the end of the game I guessed Talbot was probably a Djinn. He's the only one ever to use the hallucinogenics, same as the water in Ubar. Charlie notes that he shot him directly yet he still survived. As for the teleportation, he probably intended to lead Drake further away from Sully in Yemen, whereas with Charlie, he just needed to pilfer the notebook. This game's plot is more subtle with it's supernatural element than the others in the series, (handily fitting into it's theme of deception) but it's still noticeable
  • Does any of his supposed bullet immunity happen outside of drug-induced hallucinations? If not, that would explain that. As for him disappearing after drugging Charlie in Syria, I assumed he escaped down a hidden passage. We already know of one; why not more? The above theory that he's a Djinn would explain why he has access to the hallucination water when seemingly nobody else does. But I'm sure some alternate theory could be cooked up if needs be. To the Wild Mass Guessing page!
  • Word of God confirms he was just using black ops tricks like a bullet proof vest and an escape rope to to appear more intimidating.

• What the heck was with the spider-swarms from hell present in locations as far-flung as France, Syria, and Yemen? Marlowe's group had clearly been studying them, but since the ending of Drake's Deception suggests there never was any sort of supernatural or even preternatural horrors involved (the various horrors being, so far as we know, all hallucinations), they're kind of baffling. And they can't be hallucinatory - multiple characters all see them at the same time.
  • I had a theory that the spiders followed the hallucinogenic water. Because Marlowe and co clearly had a batch of it on them in order to control Cutter, and later Nate, I wonder if some was bought back? Therefore it could have been present in the above three places, and the spiders followed? Or the spiders are caused by the water? This is really something I wish they'd addressed.
  • I figure that Sir Francis Drake probably gathered a bunch and put them in the places anybody trying to follow his trail would go as a deathtrap.

• I'm confused about Marlowe's death. What was keeping her (last remaining) assistant from trying to save her? All he does is just sit there while yelling at Nate to not let her die. What's stopping him from running over to where Nate is, tying his own tie and belt to Nate's...belt thingy? Also, why didn't it also sink into the quicksand? I mean, if Drake's ring could sink in easily, why not the belt thingy? When Sully says, "Like hell he can't", did he mean "Of course he's not gonna let her die!" or "He won't save her!" Should he have said, "Like hell he can"? I'm just confused with the verb usages there.
  • The point is to show the difference between Talbot and Nate. They're fairly similar in their own ways, around the same age, physical fitness, etc. The only difference is their morals, and clearly their loyalty. Nate would go to hell and back to save Sully and even does when he gets taken by Talbot earlier in the game. While Talbot is loyal to Marlowe, he has his limits when it comes to risking his own life.. Hence him yelling at the infinitely braver/more noble Nate to risk his skin. Also with Sully saying 'Like hell he can't'. He's basically saying 'Talbot can get off his ass and do it'.
  • Correction: "Like hell he can't!" in this case means, "He not only can let the Big Bad die, that's exactly what Sully wants him to do". As noble as Drake is, for Sully (and us), risking Nate's life to save Marlowe's is not an option.
  • I don't know if it's about showing the difference between the men. Nate is closer to her. Nate has an item with some reach. In the time it takes for them all to work together the woman would be dead. Talbot just is not in a position to save the woman.

• How did Nate know for a fact that the piece of the Golden Hind they were looking for was in the exact same room they found out about it? What was their in the decoder, the ring, Drake's diary, Lawrence's diary, and literally everything else that has led up to that point that gave even the slightest inkling to the mere possibility that the exact thing they were looking for was in that one particular room?
  • I think that the room was filled with items that were originally in the Francis Drake museum. My theory was that Nate spotted something he recognised from the museum, and concluded that Marlowe probably had the Golden Hind in there somewhere as well. I keep meaning to take a closer look each time I play through.
  • When you enter the room the Golden Hind is one of the first things you can see. It stands out because it's shiny and looks like the deer head from Nate's journal.

• Is Talbot a Djinn, an ex-black ops or what? I'm seriously confused on just what the guy's deal is.
  • I think he was once the UK equivalent of the black ops. (Don't know what it's called, though...)
    • The SAS, famously portrayed in Modern Warfare.
  • Thank you, friend. =D

• Okay, so according to the flashback of Kid!Drake, the feud between him and Marlowe was at a stalemate because he had the ring and she had the decoder. So...for twenty years they decided to ignore each other until a day arose where they'd both resume that old quest? Just what was the point of the Kid Drake session? I mean, it's cool that we got to see how the two first met and all, but are they seriously suggesting that the both of them decided to let the stalemate go 20 years?
  • For starters, the session existed because the game is very much about Nate and Sully's relationship, it only makes sense to show where it started out. And as for the idea of a feud last for around twenty odd years, it could be that the two did clash now and again, we've just not see it in game. Or that Marlowe decided to try and find what she was looking for without the ring, and Nate was distracted by other adventures.
    • Don't forget, also, that the whole point of the first chapter is to draw Marlowe out of her hole. Wherever she's been for the last twenty-odd years, she's been unreachable by Nate and Sully for the entire time. It's not a matter of Marlowe avoiding Drake or vice-versa. It's that Marlowe is the head of a secret society, and until Nate actively goes looking for her, she simply doesn't have the time to invest in discovering Ubar, especially without the ring.
  • Sully and Drake probably wanted to keep away from Marlowe for a while. Considering she obviously has a huge amount of henchmen and weapons, and you have the exact object she wants and one of you is an ex-employee, the odds aren't in Sully and Drake's favor.
  • Plus, at the time, Drake's a child, and as we clearly saw, can't quite handle himself in a fight just yet. Sully just managed to get there seconds before Henchman #331 shot Nate. If they started up trouble right then and there...well...they may not be so lucky next time.

• Why is the hallucinogen in Ubar worth fighting over? I mean, Talbot uses more effective stuff on you throughout the game and it's never made clear what Marlowe is planning to do with it. Maybe 3000 years ago, a hallucinogen would be useful, but more advanced stuff exists now and it all seems kind of pointless.
  • Talbot's injections mostly just made you stumble around and act paranoid. That's not quite on the same level as hallucinating armies of flaming demons.
  • I always assumed it was the same stuff, just in smaller quantities. Maybe Marlowe and Talbot found a small supply of the hallucinogenic water, but wanted to find the source of it?
  • The whole acting paranoid thing may be what brought down Ubar. Everyone thought the other person was out to get them, so they had to act first. As for the 'army of flaming demons', maybe that was just exaggeration by an outside witness to help explain why a city's population inexplicably started killing each other.
  • Possibly because it could make the enemy self-destruct if slipped into their water supply.

• Sully and Nate concoct the quite reasonable theory that Ubar's destruction was caused by the hallucinogen in the water. That's all well and good, but why was the water contaminated in the first place? We can assume that the brass vessel Marlowe was raising up was brim-full of the pure, undiluted hallucinogen. But who made it? King Solomon the Wise? He couldn't have been all that wise if he thought dumping a leaky pot full of weaponized LSD in his city's water supply was a good idea. It couldn't have been intentional sabotage, either - why would the container be sealed if it was? The thing being full of Djinn actually starts to seem like the most likely explanation.
  • Here's what I believe: It's probable that the hallucinogen came from an enemy attack on them at some point, or possibly some material like lead, where they think it's useful (Because of the hallucinations), and use it for everything. But because of this material, or the invasion, they begin hallucinating, thinking they see the Djinn, and they believe that they are being betrayed. So they take some of the water, boil because they think they're purging, or doing SOMETHING to the Djinn, and just put it all into one big container, where they think they've put the Djinn king into it. Unfortunately, because the water's already contaminated, it did nothing. Alternatively, the whole story could've just gotten lost in translation.
  • Well we don't know the whole story. Nate and Sully are generating a theory based on the story and what's happening now. Whatever causes the contamination is in the container. My guess is the King thought he had safely contained this thing. It may have leaked(or could be radiation) and by the time they knew it was a problem, the water supply is tainted. Humans make mistakes especially way back when. The 2nd game already showed a very intelligent people fall to their advancements.
• What was so special about the hallucinogenic in Ubar's water? Judging from Nate alone it is neither lethal nor permanent. It doesn't seem any better than any other poison you could drop in a water supply.
  • It doesn't have to be lethal or permanent. Just frightening. It's how Marlowe's people work - with fear. What Nate drank was also diluted by water - nothing more than a few sips - and yet it sends him into a shrieking, terrified panicked fit of psychosis, and Marlowe found the source. Pure and completely at her disposal.

• Why does Talbot run from Nate in the parkour chase level? Nate is unarmed, Talbot is easily Nate's equal in hand-to-hand, and Marlowe's men are all close at hand. If he hadn't run, they could have easily overpowered Nate.
  • He was probably trying to draw Nate away from wherever Sully was at that point.
  • Word of God stated that Talbot's character wasn't as well-established at that point, and that they were just told to stick a chase scene in there.
  • Marlowe and Talbot rely on control, and Nate suddenly flipping out and charging at him caught them off guard. They weren't expecting Nate to react in such a manner, so Talbot didn't have any tricks or escape routes lined up in time, so he decided to book it.

• So, twenty years ago, Victor took Nate in and essentially became the boy's surrogate father. Except...that's not Victor's legal decision to make. Legally, Victor should've given Nate to a local orphanage or foster home in Spain, as that's where they were. What Victor did was essentially kidnap an orphaned kid from the street. How the hell did he manage to raise Nate for 20 years without getting into some kind of trouble with the law?
  • Victor and Nate are both professional criminals and con men. They live off the grid. How would they ever be found, let alone get in trouble with social services? Also, it was Colombia, not Spain.
    • Even more so would anyone actually care? I doubt there was the equivalent of an amber alert for this kid.
• I know it is normal for this genre, but why was Ubar so special that it needed all those secret ruins with clues on how to find the place? It was a nice city, but it is not like it contained something special like the secret to immortality or a way to turn people into crazy zombies.
  • It's a lost city - the "Atlantis of the Sands". And it's a beautiful paradise, but one filled with water that drove anyone who drank it into a paranoid frenzy. Hence, special.

• How did Marlowe and co. find Drake and co. in Syria? They didn't know to go there.
  • Remember that they're searching for the same thing as Nate and pals, and they've been at it a lot longer.

• How did Elena know Charlie Cutter?
  • They both were helping out Nate. Maybe the two communicated at one point? But they managed to piss each other off, so they didn't bother to make contact again.
  • Cutter was originally supposed to be in the entire game, but his actor had commitments to the upcoming 'The Hobbit' film. It's likely that he and Elena would have spoken at some point, revealing how they knew one another.

• What's the deal with the tarot cards?
  • This isn't explained very well in the game, but Marlowe's organisation is Genre Savvy and focused on psychological warfare. They play into people's preconceptions in order to seem more powerful and frightening than they really are - almost supernatural. They're also based very strongly in Hermeticism, which is linked with the Tarot (Cutter probably figured that out in his research and decided to amuse himself by picking Major Arcana to assign to Marlowe and Talbot in his journal, along with The Tower). So. When Cutter hands the journal to Talbot, Talbot finds The Tower card in the journal and has an idea bulb. He slipped the card into Cutter's jacket and left him to sow chaos and distrust in the little group while drugged. Then when Marlowe, Talbot and the goons face off with our heroes, Marlowe's people orchestrate a disaster, complete with Marlowe saying very deliberately "as if it were...in the cards." Whatever happens to our heroes, if they survive, they'll find The Tower in Cutter's jacket - the card of violent upheaval, sudden change and hard falls - and suddenly Marlowe's comment seems eerily prescient. It's nothing but coincidence and clever improvisation on Talbot and Marlowe's part mixed up with theatricality, but it looks fateful. That's how they work.

• So I played through the whole series recently and one thing in 3 bothers me. Elena, and Sully both try to convince Nate to just stop at various points before they discover the "truth" of what they are after. And even after they find out it is something bad... he keeps going. Aside from Idiot Ball, is there ANY rational reason that Drake keeps going after all the shit he has been through in the previous games? From my own experience playing through the previous two games, I could see the writing on the wall from a mile away... that whatever the treasure was, it was dangerous, and should either be left alone or destroyed. Now considering that Drake had the ONLY source of evidence to the Atlantis of the Sands and it was pretty clear by the time he was trying to use said evidence (way back in the warehouse and secret lair), my main question regarding the whole thing is why SOM Eone with their head on straight (Sully, Elena, AN Yone else but Drake since he was clearly obsessed) did not just destroy the decoder and/or ring and be done with the whole mess. Let Ubar be lost forever. Would love to see some kind of answer outside of the obvious (it would have been a short game).
  • Nate is a fairly obsessive person, especially where it concerns Francis Drake. He has this pathological need to know what the heck that guy was up to. The only time that ever faltered was when he found his remains in the first game, and assumed he never found what he was looking for. Which actually brings up another headscratcher, as he gave up the ring pretty easily there. Nate knew the ring had larger importance but I guess the idea of a sequel hadn't happened yet.

• The Citadel in Syria is a tourist attraction not far from the city. It's a few hours before the tours start when they arrive but before long there is a veritable hail of gunfire, and several points, RPG rockets. One would think that someone would have heard all that racket and the police/local militia/army would have shown up to respond to the destruction of their local tourist attraction, but all that's waiting in the morning is a tourist bus. How is it that apparently nobody heard a thing?
  • While this is far from an explanation, the Uncharted series has some history with national governments seemingly not caring about all the crazy stuff happening around Drake - note Nepalese army's conspicuous absence in their historically priceless city and Chinese army's total lack of response to Lazarević's invasion of Tibet in Among Thieves (though the latter may be explained by how remote the village was). This is the same principle - the game could hardly continue if the heroes were arrested by the Syrian army or police the moment they left the building.
  • As for the actual explanation, Marlowe could've theoretically bribed the local authorities to ignore any strange happenings in the fortress while her men go to - as far as she knows - kill two people and break into a secret chamber. The Hermetic Order certainly has the resources to do that, given how many mooks they can afford.

• This is explained by the simple notion that "they didn't think that far ahead" but in a way, it also means the writers failed a continuity check: If Nate knows Drake's ring has a much larger importance than just the coordinates to the empty coffin (as clearly shown in the kid!Nate level of Drake's Deception, not to mention the very conceit of him and Sully using the ring to lure Marlowe back out in the beginning), why does he so freely give it up when he feels let down at finding Drake's remains, thinking he failed to find El Dorado (when in fact he had stayed to insure the safety of the world from the thing)? He wouldn't have, as it held more secrets about Drake's doings before he died.
  • He may have thought the relic in the first game was what everything was about and in a moment of defeat gave up. Then later on he dug a bit more and realized there was more. Seriously Nate was just at his breaking point mentally.

• What was up with that corpse that Nate and Sully found in the French mansion? They comment on how it looks way too old to have just died recently, but it's never explained what happened to make it look like that.
  • It was likely the spiders.

• Nothing is explained about Nate and Elena's relationship or why it ended between games. The second game ends with them forming a relationship together, and by the third game they're suddenly no longer together and are mysteriously uncomfortable around each other, all with absolutely no explanation. It's incredibly jarring.
  • This Troper assumes it was because Elena wanted Nate to give up his adventuring, which he wasn't willing to do. This was, at least in my mind, confirmed in UC4 by how she angry and upset she was when she found out he had gotten embroiled in another adventure without her knowledge.

• There's no reason Marlowe should have immediately suspected Cutter for deception when she discovers Drake's ring is false. Her first assumption should have been that Drake and Sully were shot dead by Cutter with the real ring still in their possession, in which case all she would have to do is have her men go inspect their bodies in the alleyway. Only upon discovering that their bodies were gone should she have known Cutter deceived her.
  • She's the leader of a shadowy organization, suspicion is probably her default setting.

• This might be pretty arbitrary compared to Headscratchers like Talbot and the hallucinogen, but why was Young Nate thrown out of the museum? He did nothing suspicious whatsoever, the guard just grabbed him and went all Uncle Phil on him for no apparent reason.