Unlike the transition from the PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3, Naughty Dog will not be rolling out a brand-new engine for its games on the PlayStation 4. The developer has chosen to instead continue to use the engine that it has built The Last of Us and the Uncharted series on.
“We learned a big lesson coming from PS2 to PS3,” said Naughty Dog game director Bruce Straley, regarding the decision to create a new engine in a recent interview.
Back then, the company had what Straley described as “a perfectly good engine” for the Jak & Daxter franchise. But instead of sticking with it, Naughty Dog chose to start from scratch in order to make games that they were led to believe would be “like movies.” The studio proved to be able to do it anyway, but as he points out, “it took Naughty Dog four games to get there.”
“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,” Straley stated. “And that [decision not to] really caused a lot of turmoil.”
He remarked of how the studio has now learned from its experiences and will instead take the engine they have built with the PS3 and move it into the PS4; using the mindset mentioned above of simply tweaking and changing the current engine when necessary.
“We have all these things that already work,” Straley continued. “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.'”
In addition to Uncharted, The Last of Us, and Jak & Daxter, Naughty Dog is also creator the original PlayStation series Crash Bandicoot.
The Last of Us is set for a June 14 release exclusively on the PS3. For more information on the game, be sure to check out our PAX East 2013 interview with Eric Monacelli, Naughty Dog’s community strategist.
