Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End creative director Neil Druckmann has spoken out to explain how the PlayStation 4’s power is helping and improving Uncharted 4. He spoke with Gamesradar, and explained that some of the game’s scenes, for example the one we saw in the demo at E3 of Drake driving a jeep, might have not been possible if this was on the PlayStation 3.
“Because of the PS4, we do not have the constraints with memory that we had in the past,” he said. “So in the set piece, normally, we’d be going down one road [now] you can see the road branches and splits up. There’s a ton exploration in this game.”
The PS4’s power has also brought a new level of visual fidelity to the Uncharted series. Naughty Dog has gone on record saying that it was aiming for a “filmic, cinematic” look for Uncharted 4. The new model for Drake is extremely detailed, showing chest hair, stubble and sweat on his forehead.
The power of the PS4 has allowed Naughty Dog to implement 850 possible facial animations for Drake, compared to the 120 in Uncharted 3. If figures are what you care about then they’ve let us know those as well, saying single-player runs at 1080p/30fps, and multiplayer is aiming for 60 fps.
In the same interview mentioned above, co-director Bruce Straley said what we saw at E3 was just a taste in terms of the jeep. You get to drive in “much larger areas” he teased, but you won’t be able to drive a jeep whenever you want. “We’re going wide when we want to [and] we’re going to narrow it down when the story calls for it. It’s all about pacing,” Straley explained.
The full interview is available on GamesRadar.