SCEA
Having gained SCEA’s perspective on Blu-ray now it’s time to hear from one of the lead development studios for Sony, Naughty Dog. Scott Rhode started the ball rolling and now it’s Naughty Dog Co-President’s Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra will take us home with a look at how they are utilizing Blu-ray, past and future thoughts as well as thoughts on the progression of game development from the PlayStation to the PlayStation 3. The interview was conducted on Thursday, May 21st and stated with Christophe talking about how the advantages of Blu-ray are being applied to the development of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves for the PlayStation 3.
Christophe: Talking top level about the PlayStation 3 where we’re exclusively developing for the PlayStation 3 which affords us the opportunity to delve deep into the hardware and take advantage of all it has to offer. Uncharted 1 and 2 both have been really made possible through the power that is only available on the PlayStation 3. The cell processor allows us to process tons and tons of animation, way more than we’d be able to with just a few processors having the multiple functions the cell has which allows us to have dozens and dozens of animations playing on multiple characters all at once. We use the hard drive and the Blu-ray in conjunction with one another in order to create a completely load free experience so it never really takes you out of the immersion that we are going for with the cinematic gameplay we’re setting the player up so that when you die you get to re-spawn without sitting through a load screen and when your playing through the game as soon as you boot up the machine we don’t have install the hard drive your just up and playing right away like your playing a movie and traditionally in video games your sense of disbelief is broken by load screens so we just wanted the player in there and let them play the game just like they’re watching a movie. It really is only made possible by having access to a hard drive and a Blu-ray disc drive.
Q: Really great information. When Blu-ray was first announced as the format for the PlayStation 3 what were your thoughts at Naughty Dog on that announcement?
Evan: We were really excited about it because we knew we would need more space because we are going bigger, extra small polygons, more everything. We knew that with more space that the Blu-ray was just perfect for that. With Uncharted at the beginning and DVD with less storage so we said we were going to use DVD for now just when are they going to release Blu-ray right away. The first game could not fit on all the DVD so we were like shocked because that was really next generation when we need more space, we need the Blu-ray to fit all the stuff that we wanted to put in, more dimensions, more textures, better qualities for movies, multi languages and all that stuff.
Christophe: Another good example is on the PlayStation 2 we were dealing with DVD’s and after our very first PlayStation 2 game back in 2001 we were already, with the data sets we were using on the PlayStation 2, we were filling up the entire DVD on Jak 2, Jak 3 and 4 so coming into the PlayStation 3 we we’re really relieved to find out the storage on the disc was not an issue for us.
Q: How much exposure did you have to Blu-ray, given you relationship with Sony, before having to get into development?
Evan: We didn’t have any exclusive hardware or agreement or look at Blu-ray.
Christophe: We were reading what everyone else was reading about it.
Q: Do you feel that your long history with Sony with Crash than Jak on PlayStation 2, did you feel that helped you know the hardware and where Sony was coming from?
Christophe: Absolutely, I mean being able to have access to the engineers and the documentation and being able to pick a phone and get in touch with somebody really quickly, it helped us. We established our relationship, as you pointed out, early on with Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter. With the beginning of the PlayStation 3 we’ve stated a technology group here at Naughty Dog called the Ice Team which develops technology exclusively for the PlayStation 3 that we share with other first-party teams in order to make sure everyone is taking full advantage of all the power of the hardware and those libraries that we’ve written are so beneficial that we’ve decided to make them available to third-parties as well and they’ve been repackaged as the Edge Tools which are used basically by all developers developing on the PlayStation 3 at this point.
Q: With the extra space, which area are you utilizing that space for more, from extra audio, cinematic, extra content, which one area is Naughty Dog is using that space for?
Evan: Just everything. The movies are bigger, we support more languages than the first generation, and we have a lot more animations. I think if you look at a ratio everything increased. I cannot name one thing, even the code, is bigger. I can’t name one thing that stayed the same size compared to last generation so it was just across the board where everything increased for us. So everything gets bigger, not just one area. The key is bigger so you have to produce more, like more data so everything is just bigger.
Christophe: One of the advantages that Scott Rhode talked about a lot that the Blu-ray offers is the extra storage but what that extra storage provides you is not simple just more storage it lifts a burden a lot of teams who are trying to fit their content and data on a DVD have to deal with. It becomes a challenge, a chore and a task for programmers to figure out how are we going to be the most efficient with our data so that we can cram it all into a DVD and as your approaching the crunch time at the end of a project your trying to fix all your bugs, it’s just something you don’t’ want to have to deal with where probably weekly if not daily basis you have to say oh my gosh, we’ve gone over the maximum size of the disc again and what are we going to cut, what are we going to do, how are we going to compress this. We don’t have to worry about that and it really frees up a lot of development resources to just make the game batter.
Q: Do you feel that’s one of the biggest benefits of the Blu-ray where you can concentrate on one console, one system as opposed to create the same game across PlayStation 3, 360 and Wii?
Evan: If we have to make Uncharted exactly the way it is now on another system we couldn’t. It would be impossible. We would have to cut corners
Q: Do you feel you’ve even scratched the surface of the potential of what’s possible on a Blu-ray disc?
Evan: I think that we can achieve even more than that we’ve done because there are like, the way we compress the data and like I think we can fit more data that what we’ve been doing already.
Christophe: Drake’s Fortune filled up a single layer and there’s still a second layer we can go to.
Q: From Crash to Jack and now Uncharted, Naughty Dog has always really developed these characters and storylines and the realism has increased Bandicoot to Jak and his world which is very cartoony now to Uncharted. It seems that your storytelling has really evolved. Is this more about Naughty Dogs development path or is it really what the PS3 and Blu-ray format allow you to do to tell more story?
Christophe: It’s certainly a little of both. When we approach any new generation of hardware we look at what the power of the system will afford us that helps shape the design that we’re going to attempt and as you’ve pointed out on PlayStation 1 with Crash Bandicoot that thing was barely capable of doing 3D graphics so that pushed us towards doing these animal creatures with big heads, big eyes because the ability wasn’t there to capture expression out of the characters in any other way. Then with the PlayStation 2 now we’re getting some proper 3D capabilities and we thought we could go to something more human. We still stayed in the world of fantasy and Jak was an elf but we could now get expression out of our characters faces and we started getting more into the storytelling and then the PlayStation 3 and knowing we’d be able to do these really high resolution movies with just amazing audio and be able to get that all to fit onto a Blu-ray disc freed us up to explore something in the realistic realm which led us into the Uncharted universe.
Q: Have you found that the PlayStation Network has provided you with new avenues to concentrate on the launch of you title but know you can release updates later so great ideas don’t get canned?
Christophe: Definitely. We have in particular with Uncharted 2 our multi-player component which means the relationship with our consumer doesn’t end when we put the game in the box but they’ll constantly be coming back online to play our game.
Evan: For me there are two things that the PlayStation 3, one is the Blu-ray for sure and the other one is the fact we have a hard drive on every single system to keep the relationship with the players, to have something new we can just share with them because we have a hard drive. We are working on technology so we can very easily get them new things or new maps and it’s really brought the community together. For me it’s great the face that we also have the hard drive keeping the relationship with the community after we ship the game.
Q: Will gamers ever see a Blu-ray version of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune as a movie?
Christophe: Actually for internal purposes to get out to actors and people we are trying to get up to speed on the franchise we actually did make a version of the game where we took all the cut scenes and put them onto a Blu-ray and we sort of recorded gameplay in-between the cut scenes to stitch it together and basically you just pop it into your Blu-ray player and sit down and consume the entire game in an hour and a half or so like a movie and yeah, it does hold up, it’s pretty cool and we’ve found a good way to get people to understand the storylines and characters are all about without actually having to sit through and play a ten hour game.
Q: No limits, no reservations, if you could get one licensed property out on the market, what is that property you would just love to build a game around?
Christophe: That’ a tough one. At Naughty Dog we’re into developing our own IP’s and actually we don’t’ have a lot of experience working on someone else’s property and we don’t play well with others (laughing). We would have to deal with the whim of someone else, or someone telling us we can’t take their property in a direction that we felt is best for the game and that would really change the way we work here.
Evan: And the way we hire people. We hire people who are really creative and want to do something unique with technology or story or characters, environment so that’s the type of people we hire.
Christophe: I don’t’ have anything negative to say about that (license development); I don’t want to make it feel like what we do is any better.
Evan: It’s just the way we like work.
Q: You have a young gamer standing in the store looking at Uncharted 2 and he or she cannot decide if they will buy it or not. What do you tell that gamer to push them over the edge to purchase Uncharted 2?
Christophe: Make sure they know what we are tying to do with the game which is create this immersive cinematic experience and actually give the players the feeling that they are controlling the action of a star, blockbuster movie and I believe we’re delivering that experience like no other video game has ever done. You really do care for the characters, you really do get pulled along by the story and we connect with the players on this emotional level where a lot of video games are just going for the visceral and they’re stomping at the spectacle but we’re trying to layer in, of course we’re delivering all that too as every video game has too, but we’re also trying to supplement that with a deep meaningful story, engage the characters that really motivates you to see the game to the end.
Evan: Playing with your friends because we support online and co-op so you’re going to be able to go through that cinematic experience with your friends.
-----
Thanks to Naughty Dog for the time and answers and keep up with both Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra over on their PlayStation blogs as well as Evan’s twitter page chock full of delicious E3 2009 going-ons.
Comments