Naughty Dog: PS4 Pushes The Scale Of Environment In Uncharted 4

Naughty Dog’s action-adventure third-person shooter platform video game series, Uncharted (Uncharted: Drake’sFortune, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception) on PS3 gave developers the opportunity to explore the real potential and with PlayStation 4 they can push further than older system.

In an interview with GamesTM, writer Josh Scherr says, “In the Uncharted games, we’ve always strived for something that’s more along the lines of a ‘stylized realism.’

Trying to keep in line with reality just isn’t all that interesting to us, so what we use that stylistic approach for is, really, storytelling – rather than trying to keep everything consistent to the real world’s rules. ‘What is the mood of the story at this point in time?’, ‘What is the mood we want the player to experience here?’ That’s what we ask ourselves, that’s how we decide [how to create the levels].

The nice thing about being on PS4, too, is that we can push that [stylization] further than we could on the older system.”

Lead designer, Ricky Cambier adds: “We’re still trying to figure out exactly what we can do with [the PS4]. From a design perspective, it’s given us the opportunity to push the scale of the environment so you’ve got choices in the combat setups that are incredibly vast.

So we can put that in when we want to. Like Josh points out, on the design side, as well, we can really get the player into a mood: so yeah, there’s still times we’ll push the player into a very intimate combat space – if we want to layer on extra pressure for an escape sequence or something – it just gives us a wider variety of trees, density, variety, foliage, background environments and how vivid and detailed they are… it gives us all that to play with.”

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is set to release in 2016 for PlayStation 4.