Shadow of the Colossus PS4 Still Runs on Original’s Code

It’s amazing to think that one of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s biggest exclusives of next year will be a remake for a classic PS2 title Shadow of the Colossus. However, that’s due to the amount of work Bluepoint Games has put into improving and bringing up the game’s visuals for a new generation.

In a new interview with Game Informer, producer Randall Lowe praises the original development team’s aesthetic and wants to maintain that spirit of presentation for the remake. “Their [Team Ico’s] design sensibilities were amazing. The use of coloring areas, the use of fog, the way they conveyed emotion without driving it through dialogue, they’re masters of it. Maintaining that is really hard. It is a lot of conscious work to make sure that just by beatifying something, just by bringing it up to what people expect modern games to look like, you don’t break them. I think that’s the most time we spend internally.”

Lowe said that also means the game’s secret areas will remain faithful to the original. If you’re familiar with the PS2 version, then you can expect that experience to translate for the remake. “We spent a lot of time making sure we were as aware of this stuff as the community was. We did our best to maintain the integrity of the original game. Without giving away anything, players should be able to expect that what they were able to do in the past should carry forward.”

Perhaps a more interesting revelation is technical director Peter Dalton revealing how code from the original game is being used here as well. Though the rendering systems and new animation systems are built by Bluepoint, the game is still pretty much running the original’s code under the hood.

“It’s a balancing act of which systems do we keep from the original game and which systems do we replace. When it comes to rendering systems those are completely Bluepoint customized technology pieces. When it comes to animations, there are whole new animation systems underneath the hood, but at the game level it’s still the original game code that’s running.”

Shadow of the Colossus is out on February 6th 2018 for PS4.