The Last of Us Part 1 introduces a series of changes about the system combatat animationsaudio and graphics, and Naughty Dog has published a long post on the PlayStation Blog to illustrate all these news.
The new workbench animations of The Last of Us Part 1 therefore represent only one of the many aspects on which the development team has worked to improve the experience of the remaster released on PS4 in 2014.
“For me, it’s the sum of the improvements that make it a remake and not a remasterNaughty Dog’s Shaun Escayg, head of cinematic animation on the original and now creative director on Part I, explained. so saying.”
“We have revised every aspect: the artistic direction, the lighting and the respective technical aspects. Even the character designs. And we have applied the experience accumulated over ten years to the original, leaning on new technologies to create a result that updates it without distorting it in any way.”
“We have made the world more concrete. Environments and spaces have come to life,” added Escayg. “Light filters through the trees, floating moss in the flooded streets stirs as you pass, insects buzz in the bushes, cars wobble when someone lands on top of them. Each of these details adds to the plausibility of the scene, inevitably drawing the player into the atmosphere.”
“Also combat has been made more visceral. When you take cover behind an abandoned car, it rattles and creaks. The shots shattered the windows and shook the bodywork. It all adds to the experience.” Fighting is an important element of both the original and the remake.
“A lot of the changes we’ve made to the combat system have involved elements that [nell’originale] had been thrown together inelegantly,” said lead programmer John Bellomy. artificial could not analyze the environment and react accordingly.
“In approaching The Last of Us Part I, we wanted to make those fight sequences more realistic by leveraging our AI engine and tools,” Bellomy continued. “Encounters are now more dynamic, as enemies have new search and probing behaviors, can analyze topography to plan movements, and evaluate visibility.”
“As a result, the stealth approach is applicable in more circumstances. And because of this, the whole game is more challenging. No situation repeats itself. The player can find himself in new and exciting scenarios that not even us of Naughty Dog we predicted.”
Porting the game to PS5 also made it possible to increase the number of enemy artificial intelligences active per sequence, as lead designer Christian Wohlwend explained: on PS3 there was a limit of eight characters at a time and to get around it you had to “turn off” some of them and then reactivate them when necessary. Well, come on Playstation 5 this limit was raised to one hundred and twenty-eight.
“Our hand-to-hand combat system has undergone a monumental evolution,” Wohlwend said. “We were able to use the new development tools from The Last of Us Part II in this remake as well. These tools make work more flexible, simplify improvements and help prevent bugs, while elevating everything else.”
“On PS4, 3D audio was quite limited,” audio director Neil Uchitel chimed in. “For PS5, Sony has created the Tempest Engine, an engine capable of taking any audio source from a game and giving it a much more accentuated sense of spatialization through the application of sophisticated technical gimmicks.”
“The result is a greater sense of movement within the world and more accurate verticality. If something is about to hit you from above, you hear the sound coming from that direction, and so on.” A feature that can be seen right from the start, in the scene where Joel runs away from his house and you can hear the flames flaring up, the cries of the people in the street and the infected arriving.
Finally the animations, which include details such as the tear ducts that swell or the skin that reddens to underline the emotional intensity of some moments. “These animation improvements strengthen the scene,” said art director Erick Pangilinan, “because they increase the fidelity of the expressions. And in this way, they make the gestures more measured, therefore more natural.”
“The original creative vision was to emphasize the splendor of nature taking over, rather than paint a dark, dystopian apocalyptic world,” emphasized graphic designer Sebastian Gromann. “On PS3 the vegetation wasn’t very dense, while using the power of PS5 we were able to apply complex shaders, detailed models and a level of detail and volume that fully convey the sense of a nature that has reclaimed the city.”
“Other important advances have allowed us to increase the polygonal weight of characters and environments,” added Pangilinan. “By being able to add details to distant environments, such as mountains or buildings, as well as nearby objects, we were able to convey an amplified sense of depth. Using the PS3 GPU, this was not possible.”
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