Ben-DutkaWe all know by now that Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is head-and-shoulders above the competition in terms of overall technicall prowess, and according to a recent interview, developer Naughty Dog hopes this will lead to other designers taking better advantage of the PlayStation 3's capabilities.
In speaking to Gamasutra , Uncharted 2 lead designer and writer Neil Druckmann mentioned their "in-house team that actually develops tools for other first parties and even for third parties." Translation: if other developers are going to be using Naughty Dog's tools, more games could start to exhibit the technical excellence found in Uncharted 2 . Druckmann himself said he'd "like to play more games that look like" their gem of a sequel, and we're certainly not going to argue that point. In terms of the graphics, the team almost completely revamped their approach in comparison to the original Uncharted , but Druckmann also wants to clear something up about "maxing out the PS3:"
"I'm sure people have seen reports in the past where we said we were using '100 percent of the PlayStation 3,' and we're not lying or exaggerating when we say that. What we mean is that none of the SPUs are ever idle. They're working 100 percent of the time. In the first Uncharted, they were idle about 70 percent of the time, because we were just on the GPU."
What he's saying is that the PS3 isn't "maxed out," but it's all in how you go about accessing the system's available power. Remember, the team has already said they're already working to optimize that Uncharted 2 engine still further, and they've also said they could indeed make everything look even better. …that's a little difficult to imagine. But at any rate, we're excited about other teams using Naughty Dog's tools; we really, really want more experiences like Drake's newest adventure.
Related Game(s): Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
