In an interview with Digital Spy, Naughty Dog’s Bruc Straley said that the studio would not be working on a new game engine for PlayStation 4 development. Instead, it will be converting the current engine used for games such as Uncharted and The Last of Us. This decision comes as a result of the studio’s experiences when transitioning from the PS2 to the PS3.
“We scrapped everything at the beginning of Uncharted 1, and we had a perfectly good engine with the Jak & Daxter franchise,” Straley said. “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. And that really caused a lot of turmoil.”
Straley went on to say that Naughty Dog had unrealistic expectations for PS3 technology. Everyone thought that games were going to look like movies or pre-rendered cutscenes and that the graphical capability of the new system would blow everyone away. However, chasing that level of graphic perfection proved to be more difficult than they originally thought. It took the studio four titles to get where it is, which is almost at the level that Straley said the studio was hoping to start at in the PS3 generation.
“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,’” Straley said. “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?”
Source: Digital Spy