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Naughty Dog will continue to use the engine powering its PlayStation 3 titles Uncharted and The Last of Us for its upcoming next-gen titles, the studio has revealed.
Speaking to Digital Spy, The Last of Us’ game director Bruce Straley explained that scrapping previous tech to create a new engine for PS3 “caused a lot of turmoil” at the studio, which it hopes to avoid heading into the next console cycle.
“We learned a big lesson coming from PS2 to PS3,” he said. “There was a lot of hype over what next-gen was going to be. It was all going to be like movies, like a pre-rendered cutscene-style fidelity.
“That turned out not to be true. Granted, what we’re able to do now is pretty damn close, but it took Naughty Dog four games to get there – one of the top developers in the industry with some on the most amazing scientists working in our programming department.
“We scrapped everything at the beginning of Uncharted 1, and we had a perfectly good engine with the Jak & Daxter franchise. We could have started with something there and then built off of it and only changed the pieces and parts as we needed, when we needed. And that really caused a lot of turmoil.
“Again, we were creating a new IP, with a new engine, with a lot of weird expectations. Nobody had a dev kit soon enough, and as we all know, trying to figure out how to programme for a whole new piece of hardware was really difficult.”
Straley says that Naughty Dog wishes to port its current engine over to PS4 “as is”, and will only look at introducing a new engine when the tech starts to flag.
“We have all these things that already work,” he continues. “Only when we hit a wall will we say, ‘When do we need to change something? When do we need to scale it? ‘When does the gameplay, when does the story, when does the world that we need to create – when does this engine hit the wall? Right, now we need to change this part of the engine.’
“Hindsight’s 20-20, and it sounds obvious to say it, but it’s one of those things that you learn in development. We’ve gained something from this experience, and now we want to apply it moving into next gen.”
The Last of Us, Naughty Dog’s latest – and presumably final – PS3 title launches on June 14.
Source: Digital Spy
