Marco Thrush, owner and CTO of Bluepoint Games, recently talked with Digital Foundry and published on Eurogamer about the challenges of remastering the Uncharted trilogy for Playstation 4.
Marco talks about the sheer difficulty about adjusting the three games that were first released back in 2007 on the Playstation 3 to not only improve on graphics and game mechanics, but fit all the content on one Bluray disc. It goes without saying, the interview gets a bit technical.
“Obviously running double-buffered would reduce latency even more, but that gain is significantly less when running at 60fps. Bad order of processing logic such as processing input after letting the player logic update, deferred player movement due to physics or other less obvious things can easily add multiple frames of latency to player response,” says Marco about the technicalities in reducing lag in the games.
Marco goes on to talk about what has changed. “Almost every system in U1 was touched, from aim assists, switching to cover, toggling weapons, throwing grenades, increasing pick-up radius all the way to improving DDA (Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment) and increasing the size of the collision on enemies’ heads, so that headshots feel more fair and satisfying to achieve. We could write pages and pages on how many subtle gameplay tweaks we’ve made to all three games but in a nutshell we tried to make the games feel like you remember them playing instead of how they functionally were. The goal was to update and improve the systems while still keeping the integrity of the originals.”
You can read the entire interview on Eurogamer.net. Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection is currently available for the Playstation 4.