Bringing The Last of Us to PS4 was hell, says Naughty Dog

Porting The Last of Us from PS3 to PS4 has proved to be a hellish undertaking, creative director Neil Druckmann told Edge.

“I wish we had a button that was like ‘Turn On PS4 Mode’, but no,” Druckmann said. “We expected it to be Hell, and it was Hell. Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every 30 seconds… that took a long time.”

A major problem was the way in which PS3 specific optimisations had to be reworked for entirely new architecture on PS4.

“These engineers are some of the best in the industry and they optimised the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically,” Druckmann explained. “It was optimised on a binary level, but after shifting those things over [to PS4] you have to go back to the high level, make sure the [game] systems are intact, and optimise it again.

“I can’t describe how difficult a task that is. And once it’s running well, you’re running the [versions] side by side to make sure you didn’t screw something up in the process, like physics being slightly off, which throws the game off, or lighting being shifted and all of a sudden it’s a drastically different look. That’s not ‘improved’ any more; that’s different. We want to stay faithful while being better.”

Druckmann concluded that The Last of Us Remastered should be viewed similarly to buying a classic movie when it is released on Blu-ray.

“We’re working on this re-release, but at the same time we’re working on two other brand-new experiences,” he said. “When Blu-ray came out, the first thing is you buy all these re-releases of movies that you’ve loved, and then you see Gravity and you can’t wait to see it on your Blu-ray. There’s always room for a mixture of old and new.”

A firm release date is yet to be announced for The Last of Us Remastered.

Source: Edge Online