Uncharted development on course

Uncharted will soon find itself on store shelves. Naughty Dog copresident Evan Wells has posted on Sony's PlayStation blog that the PlayStation 3 action adventure game has hit beta.

"The team really pulled together to help achieve this deadline and we couldn't be more excited about the progress we've made," Wells wrote. "Finally, most everything is in the game and we are just chasing down the last bugs and making a few minor balancing tweaks here and there."

Wells also mentioned that the team had finished its last major round of focus testing on the game last week. Focus testing has been a staple of Naughty Dog games since Crash Bandicoot, he said, noting that the feedback from testing is used to help tune the difficulty of the game, among other things.

Naughty Dog has just under four weeks to finish the game, Wells said. Sony Computer Entertainment America has scheduled Uncharted: Drake's Fortune for a November 20 release. There won't be any shortage of competition for the game, given that it will launch the same week as Rock Band for the Xbox 360 and PS3; Kane and Lynch: Dead Men for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC; Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games on the Wii; and Mass Effect on the Xbox 360. However, Uncharted has the distinction of being one of the holidays' highest-profile PS3 exclusives, along with Haze and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.