Last of Us PS4 Port “Was Hell”

The Last of Us is coming to PlayStation 4, and it wasn’t at all unexpected. Regardless, it wasn’t as easy as people might think considering it’ll have taken about a year to come to shelves. How bad? Neil Druckmann, in an interview with EDGE, said that Naughty Dog “expected it to be Hell, and it was Hell.”

Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broke, and with it crashing every 30 seconds… that took a long time

These engineers are some of the best in the industry and they optimised the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically. It was optimised on a binary level, but after shifting those things over [to PS4] you have to go back to the high level, make sure the systems are intact, and optimise it again.

I can’t describe how difficult a task that is. And once it’s running well. You’re running the [versions] side by side to make sure you didn’t screw something up in the process, like physics being slightly off, or lighting being shifted and all of a sudden it’s a drastically different look. That’s not ‘improved’ anymore; that’s different. We want to stay faithful while being better.

We always build the best possible assets and then we can make the call when things aren’t fitting onscreen or in the frame buffer or in memory. That way when can choose what we need to emphasise in a moment, and where there’s a compromise on what can [be more detailed] or reduced to a lower quality.

If we hadn’t done that, we might not have made the call to bring it over to PS4.

For more of the interview, taken from this month’s EDGE magazine, check out IBT.