According to Balestra, their inability to initially cope with, for example, new shaders, made the transition difficult. “We had a pretty bad experience when we moved from PS2 to PS3, because we made some stupid mistakes. And that was totally our fault,” he reminisced.
Wells stated, ”We did start from scratch going from PS2 to PS3, and that’s down to the fact that on PS2 we’d written our own programming language. Everything on Jak and Daxter was written in a language called GOOL – game object oriented list.
“Moving on to PS3 we are entering this group of developers that we could share technology with. We wanted to get into the more traditional development environment that other studios are developing with, so we did have to start from scratch. It was a tough road to hoe.”
“It’s about the quality of the tools, and about whether you can make something smarter. My guess is that they will expand – you’ll have more this, and more that – you’ll always have something more,” he added. “In terms of our art, we always create our assets at a higher resolution than what you see in-game. A lot of our pipelines are already ready to move to something superior to the PS3. But it’s scary.”
Naughty Dog’s next project is the heavily anticipated The Last of Us.
