Uncharted 2 took Naughty Dog's epic third-person adventure series to new heights, taking a massive graphical leap over its predecessor from two years earlier.
The developer is now putting the finishing touches on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, although gamers shouldn't expect as big a graphical leap this second time round.
Naughty Dog has said that such a graphical leap simply isn't possible on PlayStation 3, suggesting that the new big leap for the series won't come until it moves over to the inevitable PlayStation 4.
"Uncharted 3 isn't just an incremental update," game director Justin Richmond said. "We did change lots and lots of things - but graphically speaking, it's not going to have the same gap [as between Uncharted 1 and 2]. It was never going to happen.
"The way we made it, how much of the PS3's power we were using... that huge gap that you saw between Uncharted 1 and 2 is the kind of thing that really only happens once per generation," he continued.
"We pushed it really hard. Uncharted 2 to 3 is still a jump, but it's a narrower jump. And going forward, it depends on what we do.
"There are always ways to improve stuff, always ways we can pull out more stops... like changing optimisations, changing streaming animations, getting more polygons on screen, progressive mesh.
"But I don't think you'll ever see that same jump again, at least on a PlayStation 3. There was just so much power left over in the PS3 when we made Uncharted 1 that we figured out how to use and really took it to town when developing Uncharted 2."
Uncharted 3 is set to launch in the coming weeks on November 3.