STACK #132 Oct 2016

GAMES

FEATURE

visit stack.net.au

PS4 owners will get the chance to play Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection in High-Def this month.We spoke with senior producer at Naughty Dog, SamThompson. Drake Remastered

W hether you missed them the first time around or just want to revisit the ternion with some next-gen spit and polish, the timing for this remastered collection couldn’t be better with Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End just around the corner. “Naughty Dog has been kicking around this idea since before The Last of Us Remastered,” reveals senior producer Sam Thompson. “There were lots of conversations, tons of ideas internally about how to best make it happen, but it wasn’t practical considering the direction of our technology, and resource wise, it wasn’t something Naughty Dog could support internally. It took aligning with a great partner like Bluepoint to make the idea a reality.” Bluepoint Games were selected when, Thompson says, the studio literally “moved mountains for the chance of working with us”. While Bluepoint did most of the hump work, Naughty Dog were on hand to dispense guidance and feedback during the project. “We knew we needed to work closely in order to maintain the integrity of Naughty Dog’s product, while providing opportunities for Bluepoint to try to improve the product where possible,” says Thompson. “The key to this process was being flexible and open to how Bluepoint wanted to work, and allowing them to put their stamp on the collection wherever possible.” So where do you start on a monumental project like this? What’s involved in bringing three games from the last generation of consoles to Sony’s latest platform? “To start, just resurrecting a decade of code from tape backup and old hard drives is not an exact science,” explains Thompson. “Then there was locating old PC hardware, software licenses, graphics cards, software plug-ins, middleware, licenses, rights to fonts, locating tape backups, master audio files, session tapes and stems – the list went on and on.

“Next there was defining the scope of the remaster: i.e., how far do we want to push improvements on the title? This was followed by getting the source code and the compiler running on the Bluepoint side. If that isn’t enough, there was coordinating legal approvals, localisation, resurrecting old QA bug databases, and sorting through years and years of old emails looking for submission materials.

unifying the weapon and aiming systems across the three titles, updating character models, audio, localisation, bug fixing, lighting, particle systems, shadows, texture resolution, draw-distance – this was all important to make happen. “For example, eliminating the screen tearing issues in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was a huge win," Thompson adds. "There were so many areas where we improved the product, it would be challenging to list them all here.” While there was universal praise for the recently remastered Gears of War, originally released in 2006, some of the gameplay did feel dated. So is Thompson concerned that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune , a game of a similar vintage, may garner a similar reaction in 2015? “I do believe the franchise has stood the test of time, and I have really enjoyed going to back and working on it again for the PS4,” he counters. “It’s been incredible to be able to relive those classic Uncharted moments and experience them again on the PS4. It never gets old. I still get goosebumps playing; it’s always a very emotional experience for me.”

Naughty Dog has been kicking this idea around since before The Last of Us Remastered.

Oh, and then there was actually making the game, play balancing and tuning, feature implementation!” Not wanting to delay load times or supply the game on several discs, Naughty Dog resisted the temptation to throw in a heap of bonus features, as the studio had originally intended to do. Instead, they decided to place an emphasis

on gameplay and visual enhancements. “Some things are sacred, others not so much. We knew we didn’t want to touch the story, but there were gameplay improvements we could make that would be meaningful. Removing certain motion controls,

• Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection is out Oct 7

OCTOBER 2015

068

jbhifi.com.au