The Last of Us Developer Will Retain Game Engine for PlayStation 4

Uncharted and The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog says that it intends to keep using its current engine for new projects for the Playstation 4 going forward.

Game director Bruce Straley says that the company doesn't intend to develop a new engine for its PS4 titles in the future due to lessons it learned when it went from the PS2 to the PS3 many years ago.

“It was all going to be like movies, like a pre-rendered cutscene-style fidelity. That turned out not to be true. Granted, what we’re able to do now is pretty damn close, but it took Naughty Dog four games to get there – one of the top developers in the industry with some on the most amazing scientists working in our programming department.”

“We scrapped everything at the beginning of Uncharted 1, and we had a perfectly good engine with the Jak & Daxter franchise. 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 also added that Naughty Dog would like to keep its current engine because it's simply easier to change parts of the engine than it is to develop a new one from the ground up. Straley made his comments in an interview with Digital Spy. 

“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’.

“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? ‘When does the gameplay, when does the story, when does the world that we need to create – when does this engine hit the wall? Right, now we need to change this part of the engine.’”