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The Last of Us PS4: Porting is not as easy as it sounds

• Egon Kilin
• May 9th, 2014

In the latest edition of Edge magazine, creative director Neil Druckmann discusses some of the technical difficulties encountered by Naughty Dog while porting The Last of Us to PS4. Apparently the task is not as simple as it sounds, even though the Remastered Edition will be more or less the same as the PS3 version of the game.

As you might imagine, the main difference will the improved graphics quality thanks to the Play Station 4’s more powerful hardware. With great graphics comes great disc space as we all know, therefore the game’s higher resolution cinematics were are real hurdle for the team. “Our cinematics are now running at 1080p and 60fps, and that involved rendering them all from scratch. It’s interesting that now [instead of a technical bottleneck], the bottleneck is ‘Can we fit all this on the disc?'”, Druckmann explains.

The Last of Us is known to crank up the resolution during cutscenes just so they can look a little better than the actual gameplay. Nothing wrong with that, we all enjoy a good looking cutscene I suppose. However, creative director Druckman says that we can also expect the higher-fidelity assets while actually playing the game when the PS4 version arrives. “We don’t build it with high assets in mind to then port it, but it did give us a leg up, if we hadn’t done that, we might not have made the call to bring it over to PS4.”

Overall, the new and improved version of The Last of Us will still feature the same gameplay and story. Except for a few minor tweaks and improved graphics everything stays the same. Apparently all that Naughty Dog wants is “to just bring it over to the PS4 and get a more solid version of the same experience.”

The Last of Us Remastered Edition is rumored to be released on  June 20 for the PS4 and will include the Grounded Bundle DLC pack. Retailers claim the game will cost $60 but this hasn’t been officially confirmed yet. We’ll let you know as soon as Sony makes an announcement, until then stay tuned for more updates and news.(source)