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No 1080i in Uncharted PAL after all

Worth considering if you have old HDTV.

Sony has confirmed to Eurogamer what some of you have been arguing about in our forum - that the European version of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune doesn't support 1080i resolution after all.

"Naughty Dog only added it to the US version very late in the development process," Sony told Eurogamer. "Including this in the PAL version would have meant delaying the game's release as a result of QA testing each localised version again."

"The extra time spent on QA could have resulted in the game launching post Christmas (rather than two weeks after the US) which would have upset consumers," the spokesperson explained.

This means that a very small sub-set of PS3 owners in PAL territories will discover that their HDTVs only display the game in 480p.

The reason for this is that some older HDTVs don't support 720p resolution, which is the game's highest available, and despite the developer's ability to upscale that 720p image to 1080i that does require a bit of extra programming to achieve.

Fortunately not many people in Europe will suffer on account of it, because most of our HDTVs are more up to date. In the US, however, the problem is much more prevalent, which is presumably why - alerted to it at the last minute - Naughty Dog acted quickly to satisfy its customers there.

In the end then, we got Uncharted on 7th December with 480p and 720p support, but not 1080i.

It's not all bad news for those two or three of you with older HDTVs, however, because the PlayStation 3 does not discriminate against games from other regions, meaning that you can always pop along to somewhere like NCSX, Videogamesplus or wherever and snag the US version, and enjoy the game in 720p upscaled to 1080i after all.

Plus, of course, it doesn't actually look bad in 480p anyway. Those Naughty Dog kids, they're not messing about.

For more on Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, check out our Uncharted: Drake's Fortune review.