Naughty Dog says The Last of Us PS4 port was no simple task
By Chris Lacey
The idea of porting a game from one console to another would seem like a pretty straight-forward process.
However, this wasn’t the case for developer Naughty Dog in respect to The Last of Us. The creative director Neil Druckmann spoke with Edge about the process.
“I wish we had a button that was like ‘Turn On PS4 Mode’, but no,”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 optimized the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically. It was optimized on a binary level, but after shifting those things over you have to go back to the high level, make sure the systems are intact, and optimize it again.”
“I can’t describe how difficult a task that is. And once it’s running well, you’re running the [versions] side by side to make sure you didn’t screw something up in the process, like physics being slightly off, which throws the game off, or lighting being shifted and all of a sudden it’s a drastically different look. That’s not ‘improved’ any more; that’s different. We want to stay faithful while being better.”
He further mentioned that the cinematics for the game are currently running at 1080p and 60fps, and that involved rendering them all from scratch.
Druckmann also mentioned that Naughty Dog while working on the re-release, is at the same time working on two other brand-new experiences.
He didn’t divulge what those experiences were, as is it could be something related to The Last of Us or an entirely new project.
You can leave a comment below with your thoughts about what Naughty Dog went through with The Last of Us port for PS4.
[H/T: Edge]