Uncharted 2: Among Thieves for the Sony PlayStation 3 has been drawing a lot of praise for pushing the technological envelope, but one of its advances has garnered some criticism for being annoying.  Early copies of the game sent out for review have the ability to link to one's Twitter account in order to announce whenever players complete a chapter or accomplish other objectives.  Finally, a game that allows your online friends and followers to virtually sit beside you and wonder when they get to play.  "Just one more guy!" you say, but you know you're never giving up that controller.  Anyway, apparently the game was a bit too tweety for its own good, as the Twitterverse was filled with progress announcements.  Can you imagine the Twitter carnage that was poised to be unleashed once the game released?  Well, the danger is over, as developer Naughty Dog has rethought the feature and disabled it in the final version of the game.

So we’ve seen some concern about the frequency of updates for those choosing to use Uncharted 2: Among Thieves‘ Twitter support. Some reviewers have had early access to the game and selected the option to update their Twitter accounts as they completed each chapter of the game. This has resulted in some Twitter feeds being updated multiple times an hour. We obviously want to provide the best experience for everybody, so for the time being we’ve disabled Twitter updates on chapter completions. The option will still exist in the menus when the game ships on 10/13, but if activated, it will do nothing. Some time after the game has shipped, we’ll release a patch to reactivate the feature, but with a limit on the frequency of updates.

This whole Twitter announcement seems like a solution in search of a problem.  Do you really care how I'm progressing in Uncharted 2 so much that you want ongoing multiple Twitter updates?  I'll be the one playing the game and even I won't care about constant updates of my progress.  This feature just generates unnecessary marketing noise, and if Uncharted 2's auto-tweets are already too much, imagine when dozens of games inevitably offer the ability in the future in an attempt at building and re-enforcing an online community.  Still, thanks to Naughty Dog for realizing how annoying this feature was becoming and for pulling back on it.  When the Twitter integration is reactivated later, let's settle on a fair compromise.  Perhaps it could just auto-tweet whenever an impressive Trophy is earned?  Those don't happen very often.  I think we can all live with that.