May is now just a few weeks away, so the wait for Naughty Dog’s survival horror game is nearly over. We don’t know a lot about the title yet, though, aside from some names and themes. To help clear this up, Lead Designer Jacob Minkoff has revealed that the game will be very… efficient:
“Hardware cycles are always really interesting because at the beginning of a hardware cycle, you don’t really know how to use the hardware yet,” he explained to Gamezone. “I think Uncharted 1 used maybe 30 percent efficiency. Uncharted 2 we were finally using 100 percent, but it wasn’t as efficient as it could be. Then, Uncharted 3 we got way more efficient. With The Last of Us, we are as efficient as we can possibly be, it’s just squeezing every last drop of power out of the system. And it’s a system we know really, really well. We know it’s constraints, so we can push it to the edges and play it really fast and loose because we know what the system can handle.”
That might not mean a lot to most people, so he also added: “It’s only because we learned the PS3 so well that we can finally push graphics that are this complex.” So yes, this is a matter of graphics. From what I have seen, the game does indeed look nice and Naughty Dog games typically benefit from beautiful scenery. Maybe not the kind of news we were all looking forward to, but it’s an interesting statement and it gives some insight in how Naughty Dog operates.
The Last of Us is still scheduled for release on May 7 2013.
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