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If I can be completely honest, I was surprised when I heard that that Naughty Dog would be bringing The Last of Us to the Playstation 4. It feels like just yesterday I was peeling the plastic off of the case and running through the prologue for the first time. It was (and still is) a powerhouse of a game.
That translated to “hell” to bring the game to the Playstation 4. Creative director Neil Druckmann explains:
I wish we had a button that was like ‘ Turn on PS4 Mode’ but no. We expected it to be Hell, and it was Hell. Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every thirty seconds…that took a long time. These enginners are some of the best in the industry and they optimized the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically. It was optimized on a binary level, but after shifting those thing over you have to go back to the high level, make sure the systems are intact and optimize it again.
I can’t describe how difficult a task that is. And once its running well, you’re running the side by side to make sure you didn’t screw something up in the process, like physics being slightly off, which throws the game off, or lighting being shifted and all of a sudden it’s a drastically different look . That’s not improved any more, that’s different. We want to stay faithful while being better.
So there you go – it’s not as easy as just flipping a switch and saying “enhance,” to port old games onto newer systems. However, Druckmann stated that the assets that the team had made initially (for the PS3 version) were “the best possible assets,” and then toned down to fit what the system would allow. That’s still not a walk in the park.
It still means rebuilding the assets, throwing them in, seeing how the new streaming works, working with the new hard drive and the new OS that you have to write whole new systems for. We knew the areas that were problematic on the PS3, where were hitting a technical bottleneck, so they were the easiest areas to improve. We brought in all the hi-res models and then its on par with what you saw in the cutscenes. There’s an improved lighting model. After that, we started looking across the board; enemies look a little blurry up close, so that was pretty easy. We ramped those up and saw a pretty significant difference.
Our cinematics are now running at 1080p and 60fps and that involved rendering them all from scratch. It’s interesting that now the bottleneck is ‘Can we fit all this on the disc?’
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