The decision comes from a desire to avoid past mistakes, game director Bruce Straley told Digital Spy. This isn’t the first time that Naughty Dog, the studio behind action-adventure franchises Uncharted and The Last of Us, have talked about the difficulties they faced when moving from the PS2 to PS3. Now, the lessons they’ve learned are spurring them to keep their tried and true game engine instead of creating a new one from scratch.
“We scrapped everything at the beginning of Uncharted 1, and we had a perfectly good engine with the Jak & Daxter franchise,” Straley said. “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.”
He went on to describe how they plan to approach the hurdles of moving consoles this time around. “We learned our lesson in saying, as we move into development into next-gen, we want to take our current engine, port it immediately over as is and say, ‘Okay, we have a great AI system, we have a good rendering system’. We have all these things that already work. Only when we hit a wall will we say, ‘When do we need to change something? When do we need to scale it?”
Naughty Dog have used the same engine for all Uncharted games and the upcoming The Last of Us, and will keep using it for many years to come. Let’s hope it continues to serve them well.
Naughty Dog will use existing Uncharted, The Last of Us engine for PS4 [Digital Spy]
Comments
6 responses to “Naughty Dog To Retain The Uncharted Engine For Its PS4 Titles”
Well, they still have to port the engine to the new architecture, and adapt all the code and workarounds designed to deal with hardware limitations on the PS3 that don’t exist on the PS4. The amount of work involved to do it properly probably isn’t that far off creating a new engine from scratch anyway.
Well you could argue they obviously have experience in trying it the rebuild route and that was negative. There are probably chunks that need to be rewritten (around the actual graphics rendering and hardware), but they already have AI systems and such that are more easily ported. Some of these game systems might already be choked to deal with previous gen processing limitations and can be scaled immediately. Pathfinding gets more processor time, for example. Number of objects that can be handled increases. View distance. Lots of cool things can be scaled up immediately when you have more power. Just running at a solid framerate.
Plus they know those AI systems and game systems from PS3 dev and their existing tools/skills can be more easily used. If you can get a decent engine built fast and early in the console lifecycle, you have an advantage. They are leveraging their own IP to save cost/time. If they manage it, good for them.
If they’re porting the engine, how about an Uncharted 1-3 compilation at 1080p/60? Same for The Last Of Us please!
A thousand times yes!!!
Wait wait wait, hang on. Did I just hear a developer say “yes ok, shiny new console can make fancy graphics but we don’t really care about that, we only care about our games being enjoyable so we have opted to not waste a ton of time making a new “next gen” engine and instead will continue to make games people love using the same, arguably awesome graphics that we already have”
Score one for Naughty Dog
If they decide to implement fish AI, they could get away with calling it a new engine.