My biggest complaint about Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Naughty Dog’s cinematic second installment in the  ongoing adventures of Nathan Drake, is that it ever had to end.

Thankfully, creative director Amy Hennig is already being pressured to give up the goods on what the future holds for our half-tucked hero, whose appearance in a third game has been assured by the second’s success - Uncharted 2 has already outsold the original “by many, many times“. While Hennig hesitates to share any concrete details on “a game that people aren’t going to see for a while,” she did reveal to Bitmob that the team is looking for another real world mystery that they can spin into an epic adventure.

“A big part of our process is a ton of research into a ton of real-world locations, real-world history, real explorers, and then real objects of mythological or historical importance, and the actual real mysteries that are associated with these things,” she said. “We take a mystery that we know exists…and then just have fun with it. We always want to say our stuff is set in the real world, but that there are still mysteries to find even in this world that we believe has been mapped, explored, and had satellite images taken of every corner…If you know how to look, you can find unexplored corners.”

“I don’t have anything concrete I can hand you at this point because I’d be giving up too much anyway,” she said, stressing again the amount of work that goes into researching real historical mysteries like Sir Francis Drake’s burial at sea or Marco Polo’s lost fleet of ships. “It takes a little while, pre-production wise, to come up with the next one and make sure that we’ve met all of those goals…but those are the rules that we place for ourselves.”

“Trying to stick to something that’s familiar and then do something unfamiliar with it.