Naughty Dog creative director and writer Neil Druckmann talked about the benefits that next generation consoles will have not only in terms of graphics in terms of story-telling. Druckmann believes that while rendering realistic characters is all well and good, there will be a point where the audience doesn’t care about more realistic wrinkles or eyelashes.
Given the fact that they were able to run The Last of Us on a seven year old hardware speaks highly of Naughty Dog’s talent. Given the memory constraints they faced while working on the PS3 they felt restricted on the number of animations that they can provide to Ellie.
“But if you’re trying to tell a more dynamic story or use AI in sophisticated ways – some of the stuff we tried to do with The Last of Us – technology will definitely go a long way. We were running out of memory as far as how many animations Ellie can carry, or how much dialog we could stream at one time.”
Druckmann believes that Sony’s next generation console could hold the solution. With the PS4’s unified architecture and much touted GDDR5 memory, more dynamism will be included in future Naughty Dog games. “And that’s where going to the PS4 in the future could really help us in the dynamic area of the game where the story is responding to the player’s input on a moment-to-moment basis. Technology still has a long way to go,” he said in a recent interview with Games Industry International.
It was confirmed not too long ago that Naughty Dog are already working on their next game on the PS4. The PlayStation 4 is slated to release on November 15th in North America and November 29th in Europe. Do you believe it will play a part in advancing the art of story-telling in video games? Let us know in the comments below.
