Naughty Dog Sticking with Current-gen Engine for PlayStation 4

Uncharted developer Naughty Dog has spoken with Digital Spy about how they’ll be sticking with their current PS3 engine on PlayStation 4.

Bruce Straley, game director at the studio, has said that they made mistakes when going from PS2 to PS3:

“There was a lot of hype over what next-gen was going to be. It was all going to be like movies, like a pre-rendered cutscene-style fidelity. That turned out not to be true. Granted, what we’re able to do now is pretty damn close, but it took Naughty Dog four games to get there – one of the top developers in the industry with some on the most amazing scientists working in our programming department.”

Straley spoke of how Naughty Dog were working from scratch for the original Uncharted and it led to a lot of unwanted problems for them. He states that no one was in possession of dev kits in a timely manner and that the studio now knows how to approach a forthcoming generation leap:

“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?”

All eyes are on The Last of Us – which will be released on June 14, exclusively for PlayStation 3. Can the developer replicate the success of Uncharted, with what seems to be a more adult-themed effort? We’ll find out in about two weeks time.