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Naughty Dog is interested in the next generation as much as the next developer, but would be happy to keep making games for the PlayStation 3 forever, Uncharted 3 game director Justin Richmond has told VideoGamer.com.
“We’re interested in the next generation just as much as everybody else, but in terms of making games… we could keep games on the PS3 forever. It’s an amazing platform,” said Richmond.
Community strategist Arne Meyer added: “We still manage to eke out a lot of power. At the end of Uncharted 2 we kept talking about how far we pushed the PS3. We went back and were like, ‘How can we push this even more?’ [laughs]. But we found a way, and that’s the thing. We somehow found a way to do it, and we can still keep doing it, I’m sure.”
Richmond continued: “The PS3 is an amazing platform, and Sony’s been an amazing partner. We’ve really refined our tools on this thing, so making games on it is kind of a dream.”
“In Uncharted 1 ….. We were using about 50, 60 per cent of the [PS3’s] power and there was a bunch of stuff we hadn’t optimised yet,” explained Richmond. “While the machine was running at full capacity, there was a bunch of stuff that was super, super un-optimised. And then with Uncharted 2 we moved everything over onto the SPUs, which are the six processors which run in parallel. When you do that, you can accomplish a lot more in the same amount of time, in a given frame.
“With this game, we already had that technology. It was, ‘How can we take what’s running in that bit right here, and optimise it even more, put even more things in there?’ That’s how we get more out of the machine.”
He concluded: “Right now our code is 100 per cent optimised to run on the SPUs, which is amazing. It lets us do things that no-one else can do. But we also recognise the fact that other studios have a hard time with that, that it is important that Sony creates tools that other people are able to use as well as we can.”
Uncharted 3 will be released November 2.
We’re sure Naughty Dog enjoys working on the PS3, but no doubt almost every Uncharted fan would love to see what the studio could do with more powerful hardware, such as the PS4 – the developer has already stated that the Uncharted franchise could continue on Sony’s next console.
