I agree with everything you mentioned! Im currently on my second playthrough of the single player campaign, and its is so much more amazing than the first Uncharted was (although I loved Uncharted: Drakes Fortune too). I also dislike competitive deathmatches, and prefer to stick to online co-op instead.

I hope they end up coming out with some more online co-op missions, either additional levels for the existing modes or just new modes all together, but who knows whats going to happen. Companies say stuff, and then end up doing the opposite when they see what the market demand really is.

I hope you're right, because as excellent as it is, I can see the co-op mode getting old a lot faster than co-op in Resistance 2 did. As bummed as I was that I couldn't play the R2 campaign co-op like I did with R1, what they did do with co-op -- the player classes, the way the game scaled the enemies to players' levels across a very wide range, the significantly larger number of maps, the larger size of those maps, and the way each co-op mission was built out of a semi-random chain of map segments to make it feel like there were even more maps than there actually were, gave it a ton more variety. By contrast, in just a few co-op games of U2 last night, I played the exact same mission twice, and the only variation at all, which was minimal, came from the other players. It was still a ton of fun, but I'm not sure how long that'll last.

OTOH, the single-player portion of U2 totally owns the single-player in R2, so maybe it's just an issue of balancing limited development resources, I don't know. And I don't know about other games Naughty Dog has done in the past (my PS3 is the first game console I've ever owned) but I guess I should also keep in mind that there wasn't any multiplayer at all in the first Uncharted, so maybe the whole multiplayer thing is totally new to them, in which case they deserve some extra kudos for doing what they did do as excellently as they did. For that matter, I might actually wind up preferring the more intimate feel of three-player games to R2's eight-player co-op; at the very least, it's a really nice option to have.

Still, I can't help but being greedy as a gamer: for U3, I want the single-player to be even better still (for one-thing, as well as U2 is written, it's still a pretty shallow thing, but there's no reason a narrative game can't have just as much emotional heft as at least an average decent blockbuster movie) and I hope they take a page from Insomniac when it comes to multiplayer, at least in terms of devoting resources and creativity to the problem and coming up with cool new ideas... or just borrowing old ones that work.

Well, I mean they should devote resources and creativity to co-op, not waste them on competitive. I'm not sure why, but even team-based deathmatch and capture the flag and whatnot just never grab me. (Maybe it's the complete lack of story and thus meaning to the objectives, combined with the lack of co-op play...?) But hey, there's something for ND to work on -- competitive multiplayer that I'll actually want to play. Now there's a worthy challenge for them.