Porting The Last of Us from PS3 to PS4 has proved to be a hellish undertaking, creative director Neil Druckmann told Edge.
“I wish we had a button that was like ‘Turn On PS4 Mode’,but no,” Druckmann said. “We expected it to be Hell, and it was Hell. Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every 30 seconds… that took a long time.”
A major problem was the way in which PS3 specific optimisations had to be reworked for entirely new architecture on PS4.
“These engineers are some of the best in the industry and they optimised the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically,” Druckmann explained. “It was optimised on a binary level, but after shifting those things over [to PS4] you have to go back to the high level, make sure the [game] systems are intact, and optimise it again.
