Speaking to Digital Spy, Naughty Dog has revealed that instead of creating a new engine from scratch for developing on the PlayStation 4, they will be sticking to engines created for The Last of Us (releasing on June 14th for PS3) and Uncharted.
These comments came from game director Bruce Straley, who revealed that, “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 program for a whole new piece of hardware was really difficult.”
This is what motivated the decision to bring their current in-house technology over to the next generation.
“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?
“‘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.”