Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End has been impressing all and sundry with its visuals and action, earning strong praise at E3 2015. In a new Conversations With Creators video with Wil Wheaton, co-lead designer Anthony Newman talked about using the hardware to push the quality of environments and choice that players could have.
Using The Last of Us as an example, Newman said, “One thing we tried to with The Last of Us, and it was really challenging because we pushed the memory of the PS3 to the limit, was have more open environments. We really wanted to give more player choice; a greater sense of freedom; and kind of exploration in these levels. And that’s something that’s even better for Uncharted with Nathan Drake’s incredible moveset and navigation and stuff. So one thing that we’re definitely doing is we’re opening it up a lot more. And the memory of the PS4 is definitely allowing us to do that.”
With Uncharted 4, the level of visual fidelity has been significantly increased. So much so that cutscenes are now in real-time.
“Another thing that’s super exciting is the fidelity of the characters. It’s just going crazy now. We’re actually doing real-time cutscenes in Uncharted 4, which is a new step for us. You’re not going to see those black bars that we used to have in between gameplay and cutscenes. That’s going to let us be so much more expressive and really get that seamless-ness between the storytelling and the gameplay. Which we already do very well, but it’s going to allow us to take it to that next level.
“That super great-looking Nathan Drake that’s in the cutscenes – that’s going to be the guy you have the whole time. The lighting model is nearly identical. All of that emotion you get across in the cutscenes, you’ll have in gameplay all the time.”
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End will be out in early 2016 for PS4.