Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann recently sat down with Edge to talk about the work required to bring The Last of Us Remastered to the PS4. The ease-of-use of Sony’s next-generation console system has been praised by many developers, but porting one of the most complex PS3 titles to the PS4 wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows:
“I wish we had a button that was like ‘Turn On PS4 Mode’, but no,” creative director Neil Druckmann says. “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. These engineers are some of the best in the industry and they optimised the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically. 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.”
Druckmann’s discussion of the difficulties Naughty Dog faced with The Last of Us Remastered is quite interesting, but he also dropped a bombshell in regards to the studio’s next project: “We’re working on this re-release, but at the same time we’re working on two other brand-new experiences.”
One of those “brand-new experiences” has to be Uncharted 4, but the second project is currently a big mystery. When we last checked in with Naughty Dog, the developer was debating whether or not to move forward with The Last of Us 2 or an entirely new property. It looks like that decision has been made, but it’ll probably be a while before we hear anything else about it.
