Last of Us PS4 'Will accelerate future Naughty Dog development'

"Nothing helps a transition between consoles more than making a full game"

Development of The Last of Us Remastered was greenlit in part to help accelerate Naughty Dog's technical knowledge of PS4, community strategist Arne Meyer told CVG.

The PS4 game was in "heavy" development for just six months - though preliminary tech work began a year ago - said Meyer, and will benefit the studio's tools pipeline to a degree that it can "have a good head start" on its next, full PS4 game, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

"Every single one of our game releases always benefits the next," he told CVG.

"We work under such an iterative process that our technology either informs future decisions or, as has been the case of with Uncharted, once we take care of one aspect we move on to another, like how we did water, then snow and sand.

"We're always building on top of what we've done previously, and The Last of Us Remastered is probably one of the more concrete examples in a way. We're making this in a way that benefits our PS4 tools pipeline so that we can have a good head start on our next, full PS4 game."

According to Meyer, Naughty Dog began to consider a PS4 remaster of The Last of Us "right after" the completion of the PS3 game.

"We had been working on a PS4 engine and tools for a while at that point," he explained.

"There were a couple of reasons that we decided to do it and one was that we thought back to when we had to build an engine from scratch when moving between PS2 and PS3 - that was a really painful time for the studio and we wanted to avoid that with PS4.

"Nothing helps a transition between consoles more than making a full game, because you learn so much about what you need for tools."

The other reason for the project's go ahead, according to Meyer, was that a large portion of the PlayStation userbase didn't purchase the original game, despite some seven million sales.

"We realised that the launch of the PS4 was hugely successful and there were a lot of people who either chose not to play The Last of Us on PS3 or were new to the PlayStation platform. We thought it would be a great idea to try and capture those players."

The The Last of Us Remastered release date is today, July 29 in North America and this Friday, August 1 in the UK. CVG's The Last of Us Remastered review said "one of last year's highlights is now one of 2014's best games."