Naughty Dog Not Creating New Engine for PlayStation 4

Instead of crafting an entirely new engine for the PlayStation 4, Naughty Dog will instead opt to modify its existing engine. Considering that tech has made some of the best looking current generation games, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Speaking with Digital Spy, Naughty Dog game director Bruce Stanley talked a bit about the challenges the developer faced moving from the PlayStation 2 to the PlayStation 3, and how Naughty Dog doesn't want to make those same mistakes moving to the next generation.

"We learned a big lesson coming from PS2 to PS3," Stanley said.  "There was a lot of hype over what next-gen was going to be. It was all going to be like movies, like a pre-rendered cutscene-style fidelity. That turned out not to be true. Granted, what we're able to do now is pretty damn close, but it took Naughty Dog four games to get there - one of the top developers in the industry with some on the most amazing scientists working in our programming department."

After attempting to not only craft a new game, but a new engine as well, Naughty Dog decided to take a different approach for the PS4. This time, the developer will be upgrading the engine used in The Last of Us and Uncharted, which is already rather impressive. "We learned our lesson in saying, as we move into development into next-gen, we want to take our current engine, port it immediately over as is and say, 'Okay, we have a great AI system, we have a good rendering system,'" Stanley added. "We have all these things that already work. Only when we hit a wall will we say, 'When do we need to change something? When do we need to scale it?'"

With The Last of Us do out in just a few weeks, Naughty Dog hasn't related any new info on its potential PS4 plans. However, E3 is just a little more than a week away, and there could be some surprises in store at Sony's press conference.