Uncharted and The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog isn’t afraid of much, having already conquered PlayStation 3, but the transition to next-generation hardware is something the Santa Monica-based studio fears will be “difficult.”
“When you’re going to new technology, every day is a slog, progress is slow and it really takes a different kind of attitude and mentality to get through that kind of push and it’s not right for everybody,” said Evan Wells to Eurogamer.
The shift from PS2 to PlayStation 3 development was “the period that Naughty Dog had its darkest days and we lost people on a weekly basis – people just couldn’t get through it.”
Naughty Dog co-president Christophe Balestra chimed in, adding, “We made some mistakes with our move from PS2 to PS3 and we won’t make those again. I guess we’ve done it a couple of times!”
The AAA studio currently has two teams, one kept entirely secret up until the reveal of The Last of Us earlier this month. The other team – the Uncharted team – according to Balestra, is currently “not working that much. Some of them are working mainly on DLC for [Uncharted 3‘s] multiplayer, and a lot of them are on vacation.
“I think the team’s going to regroup and we’re going to figure out what’s going to be the next move is for that team.”
Wells added, “Next-gen, current-gen – that’s totally in the air.”