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Speaking to VideoGamer.com in an exclusive interview, Naughty Dog Co-President Evan Wells has shed some light on where the studio is at with its PlayStation 3 development. If you thought Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was the best you were going to see from the PlayStation 3, think again.
“On past generations of hardware, we felt limited by the technology so we designed our games around stylized fantasy worlds. With the PlayStation 3, for the first time, we felt we could convincingly render human characters and real world environments so we decided to go for it,” stated Wells.
“Nothing we do works the first time so we iterate over and over until everybody is happy with it. We have artists that ride the game designers until the gameplay is fun and we have programmers who get down into the nitty-gritty of animations with the artists until the movement is silky smooth.”
Wells believes that developers should be finding their stride on the PlayStation 3 hardware now that it’s been out for just over a year. “… I think you’ll continue to see all of PS3 development improve throughout the generation,” he commented.
On the subject of what gamers can expect from the Uncharted game engine in the future, Wells is confident that we haven’t seen anything yet.
“We will continue to refine the Uncharted engine for years to come. With Uncharted we’ve only just started to tap into the potential of the PS3. Particularly with the Cell processor, we should be able to do a lot more.”
And what about those pesky SPUs that seem to make the headlines a lot when talking about PS3 game development? Do they hold the key to maximising the potential of the console? Wells thinks so:
“We’re already busy porting more of our systems from the PPU over to the SPUs and seeing huge benefits. There are also a lot of cool rendering effects that we’re experimenting with that will help with any game we develop with the engine.”
Uncharted, as good as it is, is already a game of the past. Naughty Dog is already hard at work on its next game and making good progress.
“We should be able to do so much more this time around, given the fact that we aren’t trying to build our engine and development environment at the same time we are trying to make a game,” stated Wells. “The effort can be much more focused on what we want to do, instead of how we want to do it. As for what games will look like in 3 years, it’s anybody’s guess. At Naughty Dog, we’re pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2.”
Head elsewhere on the site for the full interview with Naughty Dog’s Evan Wells in which he reveals how happy he is with Uncharted and why the studio isn’t considering working on the PSP.
