The game represented the culmination of seven years spent working with the PS3 console

May 17, 2014 13:09 GMT  ·  By

The Last of Us is making its way to the PlayStation 4 as we speak, and it appears that the transition process was far from being a smooth one. While it won’t be the first game to make the jump to the new generation of consoles and 1080p, it didn’t have the advantage of a fully-working PC version to port over.

Instead, the game was built on a state of the art engine custom tailored to the PS3, using all the quirks of the hardware that the team discovered over the years and taking advantage of hardware-specific optimized code in order to offer the supreme experience on the PS3.

As such, Naughty Dog revealed that porting the PlayStation 3 exclusive hit action adventure title The Last of Us to the PlayStation 4 next-gen home entertainment system was no picnic. Instead, making the move to the PlayStation 4 was described as being “hell,” in spite of the fact that the team didn’t expect it to be easy to begin with.

Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann spoke about the porting process with Edge magazine, revealing among other facts that all the cinematics had to be rendered from scratch in order to be displayed at 1080p and 60 frames per second.

“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 30 seconds … that took a long time,” Druckmann said.

He said that the people working on The Last of Us are among the best in the business, and the level of optimization for the specifics of the PS3 hardware was astounding, done at the binary level, and that meant that the team had to go through everything at the high level after moving to the PS4, to make sure that all the systems are intact, before optimizing the game for Sony’s next-gen console.

“When you see it running on your big TV and you see all the hi-res assets running smoothly, it’s hard to go back to the previous version after that, but it’s hard to show all the work, the optimization and the artistry that went into it,” he said, pointing out that one of the main concerns of the team was whether they would be able to fit everything on the disc.

In addition to porting the much-acclaimed The Last of Us to the PlayStation 4 platform, Naughty Dog is also working on two other brand-new projects, to be revealed at a later date.