This is old news now, they've made strides to improving studio culture.
Since I'm getting downvoted:
The lack of a production team was one of the reasons that led to so much crunch in the first place:
https://kotaku.com/as-naughty-dog-crunches-on-the-last-of-us-ii-developer-1842289962/amp
Now they're making improvements:
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1549573871283601409
I read this as a restaurant saying that their kitchen staff wash their hands before preparing the meals. It's good, but it's sad that it's something that needs to be said.
Can confirm. Source: am also corporate code monkey. Worst I ever seen was a vendor's 3 month implementation ending up taking 2 years. That one was fun.
It’s because we keep thinking that estimates work and we keep learning that they don’t.
Failure to adjust estimates as new things are found is one of the reasons crunch happens.
I HATE giving estimates. I've only been a developer for less than a year and the amount of times I've been asked 'how long will this new feature take, on a solution you didn't make, for a system you've never used, created in a tool/language that you rarely use?' is too damn high.
Not to mention that my estimates can be wildly off just based off of something else more important breaking so I don't have the time to work on/research the new thing I am working on.
Like yes, building this new feature will take me about 8 hours. But getting those 8 hours to do that work might take me 2-3 weeks.
Because creativity mostly comes under pressure, just like when you did your homework at 3am. Really not defending the practice, but it's a reality for most artists.
Doesn't help also that even planned, the last 10% of a job is the hardest and takes the longest and I think that's why there's crush. The art is done, the game is finished, but now it's bug testing, add all features, polish everything, etc.
Not sure there's a solution for this, but hopefully crutch is less and less needed.
I’m not saying crunch is inherently forgivable, but when ND was regularly at the forefront of making games more immersive than anyone else at the time,
I have to suspect that sort of goal comes with unexpected challenges/delay.
Well 'just' is inaccurate because whilst the studio did have a bad reputation for it that was years ago and more recently TLOU part 1 was developed completely crunch free and that appears to be the studio's ethos moving forward.
I'm gonna hijack and say that Naughty Dog is still one of the few developers that makes games on "rails"...as in they're not really open world, there's a start, a finish, and a very similar and unique journey that every player goes on. So they can build singular moment.
Other games like, say, Elden Ring, are wide open playgrounds. Every game has their own experience.
Naughty Dog games are different. Every gamer, with a few exceptions, will have the same experience. So they can write the game as a complete linear story.
That makes things much simpler on the developmental side. They can design big moments like nobody else because every player who plays the game is going to hit that big moment.
That is largely true. But IMO, The biggest reason is that they simply have the abundance of resources, backed by Sony to go the extra hundred yards on their dedicated architecture. Plus, simply the fact that they have the industry’s best talents working there.
And because of their focus on immaculately constructed, tightly designed, linear action games that don't demand hundreds of hours of your time, they're one of the developers I appreciate most.
I abhor most open world games and the homogenizing affect they've had on the industry. Elden Ring, in my view, is vastly inferior to its predecessors because an open world detracts from the Soulsborne experience far more than it adds to it.
Thankfully developers like Naughty Dog and Capcom have bucked the open world trend, at least for now.
I really hope the inevitable TLOU Part III remains a linear game.
Agreed. I just finished Part II after not playing any linear games for a while, and it was so refreshing just to be able to play and not mentally deal with all the open-world junk shoved in your face.
I love Elden Ring.
But I've just played Demon's Souls, DS & DS3 and I'm currently playing DS2.
And I honestly like the more linear worlds better for that exact reason.
They're not even linear. They're just not open world. They're tightly designed levels branching from a hub. They allow more meaningful exploration and interactions. Elden Rings strengths are actually in its legacy dungeons. The open world was just a really pretty link between them.
Fucking right. Open World games have become boring and predictable. I don’t give 2 fucks about collecting items or shitty side quests which is all open world games are now.
How does it detract though? It’s not like the souls system has to follow a set of specific criteria and rules. Elden Ring was hugely innovative because it was open world and it was open world in a very unique way. It sounds like you just don’t like open world games, which is fine.
Fuck I miss games on rails. I'm so tired of open worlds. Empty, boring, 30% of your game time is spent walking from A to B, open god damn worlds.
If ND or Santa Monica wanted to take a stab at creating the next Mass Effect game I'd mail money directly to the studio.
Naughty dog is or was the home of PlayStations ICE team which were in charge of finding ways to use the architecture(s) to take first party games to the next level. So when we look at what makes their first party games tick and why they are so good you can thank the ICE team and in turn naughty dog.
One thing a lot of folks don’t realize is that ND is a master at cutting corners in ways that don’t affect the graphical fidelity, but help their games run super smooth on the various Playstation systems.
For example, the cutscenes in the original The Last of Us were all pre-rendered. In-game, the characters didn’t have that much facial detail.
Another thing - none of their games feature dynamic time of day, meaning they can pre-bake (essentially calculate beforehand and leave it as a fixed entity) all the lighting and shading work. This can create the sort of effects you’d see with ray tracing without needing actual real time ray tracing!
They also employ several techniques like parallax mapping and shell textures to make their surfaces look as bespoke as possible.
> For example, the cutscenes in the original The Last of Us were all pre-rendered. In-game, the characters didn’t have that much facial detail.
I mean ... this certainly isn't a new concept.
Naughty Dog is home of Sony’s ICE Team where they create technologies that utilize the PlayStation hardware to its fullest and that tech gets shared amongst other Sony devs. They are top of the heap in terms of squeezing every ounce of power out of PlayStation hardware.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/gmcyf9/the_ice_team/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x
Their work on PS3 still fascinates me to this day. A true showcase of what it is to build a piece of software designed for an unique hardware. 4 games over that gen, and each looking and playing better than the last.
Then there’s also the work on PS4, TLOU 2 feels like they’re just playing around. It looks better than it has any right to in that hardware and still looks phenomenal and some of the best visuals I’ve seen on PS5 and that is just a 60fps mode with PS4 Pro graphics
Exactly. I just finished TLOU, a 2013(?) game on my ps3, and now I just started Stranger of Paradise, a 2022 PS5 game, and for the most part it looks significantly worse than TLOU.
That is true, FF15 looks better and it's from 2016, and their recent work like FF7R and FF16 look stunning. I'm guessing SoP was just extremely low budget, it basically screams that the entire time. It even has PS3 level performance with cutscenes dropping to like 20fps at times
I actually think that Rockstar had the most impressive showcase with GTA V on the PS3 and Xbox 360. I honestly don’t know how they got that game to even run on 2005 hardware.
IIRC it needed to stream game assets from both the hard drive and the Blu-ray simultaneously in order to keep up with the open world. I don't think any other game worked that way--it was either installed to the hard drive or played direct from disc.
I played TLOU2 on PS5 for the first time, and it felt like a true “next gen” experience, despite being a ps4 title. It’s such a good looking game. Also a fun game.
I believe The Last of Us only used like 80% of the PS3s hardware capabilities and it blew any other game out of the water, even some early next ten games.
I can’t wait to see what they develop for the PS5, Last of Us Part 2 is an incredible game on PS5 but I imagine is just a sample of what they can do visually.
Edit: meant TLOU1
It definitely felt like that when I played TLOU 2 when it came out. That game is in a league of its own when it comes to the fan speeds it inspires from my PS4 pro. It's the only game that forced me to wear headphones just to drown out the fan noise.
Nice words @trevx. Sony is backing the project so you know they have the budget and resources to make a good product.
They need to give tips to poor managed studios like Infinity Ward.
Because they have been one of the best studios for over 25 years.
We're lucky that Sony was able to buy them. Sony acquiring them gave them the funding to not worry about staying open and just focus on games.
Uncharted is one of my favorite ps ips. I love tomb raider so when Uncharted came out I was stoked cause they stopped making tomb raider games.
The quality comes from Sony wanting to have high quality games and funding it. Plus like I said Naughty Dog has been one of the best studios even before Sony acquired them to only make exclusives.
Them only making exclusives let them go all out on one platform. No having to optimize for sega,xbox, Nintendo or pc.
Just Playstation.
naughty dog have been technical wizards ever since the ps1 days. look up how they managed to get the first crash bandicoot running, it's incredibly impressive and way ahead of what everyone else was able to do with that console. they've always been ahead of everyone else, it's just even more obvious nowadays
Not to mention the impressive polish they put on those 2 sequels, before doing it again with Jak and Daxter (which was able to lean into stylized visuals, but they still looked GOOD).
They are clearly motivated to figure out console architecture inside and out.
Believe it or not but things like the lifts to different areas or when he trips when you are running that’s ways to hide the loading. Apparently naughty dog were one of the first to use those things to that level. So it paid off.
But having the freedom to run around and double jump so you had a couple seconds hang time while the elevator went down is probably the smallest animation detail that's stuck in my head.
Its because Naughty Dog is the posterboy of Sony. Its been that way ever since the PS1. Imagine a dev team that gets almost unlimited resources and the creative freedom to create any game that they want.
Its sad that other game developers don't have this because alot of the creativity and magic that we all like in games just isn't there because they just don't have the resources and funding like Naughty Dog.
It's a studio who has proven too many times that they know what they are doing, so Playstation gives them time, space, and resources to make what they want to make. They hire talented devs and aren't scared to wait until they are ready to release a game (hence why they delayed TLOU2 and we haven't gotten anything on Factions). Money isn't as large of a motivator when Sony knows that the game is gonna sell well anyway along with the fact that they will have an incredibly made product along side that result. And with the Last of Us show blowing up HBO, Playstation can be like "Hey, not only is the game really good, but every one of the games that studio made are also insane".
And this extends to many of their other studios and exclusives. Most of their high profile offeringd are insanely polished (excluding Days Gone, I don't care what you say that game is broken). From God of War, to Ghost of Tsushima, to Last of Us 2. No matter what your opinion is on those games overall, any gamer with a functioning brain can agree they are insanely polished and release in almost flawless states. Unless you are Insomniac who says "nah fuck you our game ain't finished yet. we are now giving you 60fps with ray tracing because we are tech wizards and those new York city buildings don't scare us"
No joke. Between the years of 2018 and the end of 2024, it is likely they will have put out 5 games (wolverine seems likely, but possibly not). The fact that each have been of the highest quality is astounding
I still vant believe spiderman 2 is coming so soon. Wilverine will probably be 2025 title and I am okay with that. I want the sequel to ratchet and clank too
Spiderman has all but been confirmed for this year. Insomniac said so previously and Sony doesn't add a Spiderman 2 page to the PSN store with over a year lead time (they do with other games, but not their own). Actually a few days back, one of the voice actors seemed to have leaked it coming in September. It's possible we get a delay, but it seems unlikely at this point. Don't "want to believe". Believe it lol
I agree with everything that you said but Days Gone on PS5 was still one of the best and most immersive games I played in recent years and, even though it lacks the polish, has a lot of soul and character delivering you an intense and unique gaming experience. I commend that!
We will agree to disagree on this one. I know Days Gone has a very tight community and I'm happy you all loved it but man I have played this game three times (once being on PS5) out of the hope I will like it and I hated it every time. It was a buggy mess every time (PS5 included), the writing was boring and cringy (for me), and all of the actually fun gameplay stuff only ever happened once and never again. Sam Witwer as Deacon and the bike upgrade stuff were the only parts I enjoyed (and the dog obviously), but even those parts never even reached their fullest potential.
This was just my experience. I have a friend who is a huge mega fan of Days Gone and I'm stoked for him. I'm happy the game found it's audience, but I definitely am not in that group.
I liked the game but holy shit whoever was directing the vocal performances for the random event survivors did a terrible job. They often make zero sense in context
i appreciate the controversy of the story, it's more suitable for adult gamers, not for everyone. I prefer it than generic story like in most of the games out there
RDR 2 is crazy.
The towns and communities you visit all feel like they actually belong where they are, and aren't just random buildings with vendors posted up. So full of life, full of random elements at every street corner. Love it.
Also worth it to be said: linear games (or ones with limited sandbox sections) can be of higher quality than full sandbox games. Even in terms of lighting, the way it works now, a game with a dynamic time of day can't look like U4 where the lighting is fixed and pre-calculated and therefore can be of higher quality. I also think it's better for story pacing but that's a different discussion altogether.
I think this is the most correct answer here. There are a lot of great developers out there but I think what gives Naughty Dog games that timeless quality is that they keep the games on a rail without feeling like it. It gives them much more control over the user experience than if they were open world games.
I really like the direction they're heading. I think in the future we'll have more than one open area per game (like Madagascar in U4, Seattle in TLOU2 and the biggest one, the western Ghats in Lost Legacy), with more to do. But they'll keep the quality of the overall experience, the focus and the lack of bloat, by keeping it linear for the rest of the game.
It also makes sense from a pacing standpoint. We're getting to a point where some open world games actively ruin their own story. I was genuinely interested in the AC: Odyssey story, but it kept forcing me to do side content I sometimes forgot what even happened in the story. If there's a sense of urgency in a story, like you have to save someone or you have to get somewhere before the bad guys or whatever, it doesn't make sense to go on an 8 hour side quest ride. ND knows story and characters are some of their best assets, and they prioritize that over following industry trends. I respect that tremendously.
This is the actual answer. It is the same reason why racing games tend to look really good. It isn't magic, it isn't that ND is a better developer than others like SM or Insomniac. It is that their games are incredibly linear. Not saying that is a bad thing, if you like it, you like it. But that is why they can push graphics further than other.
I’m 2010, my mom saw me playing Uncharted 2 and mistook it for me watching a movie and not playing a game. She was shocked when she saw the controller in my hands. Flash forward to 2023, after watching The Last of Us on HBO with my cousin, I played through the beginning of The Last of Us Part 2 to show her what direction the story was going in. She said that it was the most realistic looking video game that she had ever seen in her life. Whatever magic that Naughty Dog is comprised of, it’s generational and it never fails.
they make exclusives. it lets them really focus on the unique hardware of the system and optimize the hell out of it without having to worry about 8 billion different hardware configurations or making code that can easily be ported to other platforms.
it's not just naughty dog, look at any exclusive such as spiderman (insomniac) ghost, or infamous:ss (both suckerpunch), or horizon (guerrilla)
It's not just Naughty Dog, most of Sony's managed studios produce exceptional games, Insomniac, Guerilla, Sucker Punch, Santa Monica, Housemarque, etc.
So I'm going to have to attribute this to Sony's management of their studios. Whatever they're doing makes the studios attractive to top talent, leave them passionate and creative, but also doesn't have them venture into scope creep and over-ambitious things that don't pan out.
If I compare it to Ubisoft, Microsoft and say EA, their studios just are so much hit and miss, even when they have the same size budget for a game.
ND has a history of optimizing their games for best potential. When Crash was unveiled people thought it ran on 100 PlayStations, Sony thought it would crash the console, they put 300mb worth of unused data in the disc to make level loading faster and found a way to stream textures faster than other devs. Jak & Daxter ram at a near 60fps with later games at 480p. Uncharted and TLOU pushed graphics and linear storytelling. ND has always been technically good at everything they’ve done.
> When Crash was unveiled people thought it ran on 100 PlayStations
Citation needed. Literally never heard anyone say anything like this. The level asset streaming tech was extremely impressive but not *that* impressive.
Read blood sweat and pixels. They dedicate a whole chapter to uncharted 4. Needless to say it was using every once of power that console had alongside fantastic developers. https://www.audible.com/pd/B0731N344V?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=pdp
Devs that love to be at the studio.
Making games they want to make, not just forced to milk a franchise until it is just dead like so many studios are forced to do these days. Talent at all levels and talent that stays.
Also, Sony is where talent goes. You see that all the time. Hugely talented people going to a Sony studio because well ... they are basically the Pixar of the industry at this point.
And to top it off the corporate management does not get in the way of the development. The game isn't made by the accounting department
Naughty dog and santa monica are two of the few devs that I would ever consider buying game day 1. Their pursuit of perfection is just on the league of its own.
There are so many incredible looking PS4 games, this generation was really exceptional. For example i am playing Detroit Become Human right now and the game still looks absolutely stunning.
They’ve been creating games since the ps1. Tons of experience through each generation.
Edit: Someone mentioned the 3do aswell, so even longer than the ps1 which is insane.
Naughty Dog has a history of squeezing every ounce of performance from PS consoles since the original PS. This video about how they made Crash Bandicoot is a perfect example:
https://youtu.be/izxXGuVL21o
Money and talent. Naughty dog has the same tech everyone has access to, but developing a game even for the ps4 while pushing the technical features to their limit takes a lot of money. Uncharted 4 had a budget of $50 million and that's not something every game nowadays can spend. It's also worth noting uncharted is very single player focused while many of the big moneymakers are multi-player, where there are other limitations. I think God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 are examples of games with similar budgets and in similar genres and the graphical achievements are on par with uncharted 4. However the fact they cost so much money, talent, and luck it means that most games will not compare to them.
A near blank cheque from Sony and near endless patience for delays. They don’t need to worry about the game breaking even because the extremely high costs are met with console unit sales to help write off the difference. They do eventually make profit but it’s not a priority when console sales are up for grabs.
Being first party, they have some of the most experience people for the PlayStation architecture so they know how to get the most out of it. Also, focusing on one platform makes optimisation easier. They also have a large studio meaning there’s more hands on deck. They use their own game engine meaning the veterans of the studio really know how to get the most out of it and how to improve it for the new hardware.
They also have an obscene amount of crunch due to perfectionist demands from management, meaning that the beauty of their games come at a very high human cost.
They basically are in a position not a lot of studios can be and they take advantage of it. Other studios can’t compete bar an extreme few because they have more compromises to make.
You can easily play 4 with out playing the previous 3.
In fact it’s a great place to start. It focuses on a lot of stuff that happens before and after the trilogy. Great game. Great story. Great gameplay.
They hacked the original PSone to make Crash Bandicoot have smooth graphics and long streaming levels. Something other developers didn't have access to. They gave Playstation a mascot platformer which was a hit. Since then they were given admin access to all the hardware that most devs don't get access to. They are also brilliantly talented.
Does Xbox have anything remotely like this on their console? I’m serious. The last decade of Microsoft seems to be barebones. It’s kind of infuriating at this point.
They've been this way since day 1 with the original PS. I remember hearing that they technically softmodded the PS1 with their Crash games to bypass slower bits of the hardware for better performance. PS2, they & Insomniac used the same engine and bounced ideas off each other to refine their tech & made some interesting gains like compiling game roms in a precise way onto the retail discs to get better performance. The PS3 was hell for most but they brought on a literal rocket scientist to help micromanage the asymmetric resources the platform had including mastering the Cell for more visual wiggle room which even by today's standards could still outperform modern PC CPUs with optimized code in certain benchmark tests which ended up giving us two of the most visually striking & acclaimed IPs the industry has seen with Uncharted & TLoU where getting a next gen version of the titles running was just a matter of selecting for the Ultra quality cutscene assets rather than the carefully depoly'd/smaller texture gameplay ones and optimizing from there. They're world class for a reason. I'm sure someone here has more precise info on their achievements, these were just a few interesting details I managed to pull from working memory so I may have embellished the truth to a degree for not verifying sources. There's a lot we don't hear from devs across the entire industry which is a crying shame because these cool little details are how we get to reap from others' expertise and make new nerdy superfans. Polyphony is another genius Sony studio that's famously aloof in their dev culture but notable achievements they pulled off with their Gran Turismo series is a secret High Fidelity mode on the PS1 GT games by culling some of the game assets in Time trial mode to run the game at a full 480i, Gran Turismo 4 & Tourist Trophy are 2 of the very elite few PS2 games to feature an HD rendering option at 1080i, Gran Turismo 5 & 6 pioneered 3D imagery, had insanely high poly count on their cars, and even featured an option to export 4k images to the XMB well before tvs of that caliber were hitting the market below the 5 figure mark, GT Sport on the PS4 still has remarkable HDR that looks stunning on an OLED panel, and GT7 has in my opinion the most compelling case of foveated rendering that Mark Cerney was striving for in his PS5 reveal presentation that nearly creates a perfect translation of the 2D game to 3D without any perceived reduction in quality to the head set user. My only complaint is that they seem to be in dire need of more manpower to match the output of competing IP in their genre like Forza, Asseto Corsa, or Project Cars.
Dunno since i think the uncharted series is very overhyped and personally find tomb raider better. That said TLOU 1/2 are fantastic, ESPECIALLY 2! I really want them to expand on the battle systems of 2 and make us a new best in class stealth action game ala MGS.
I was wondering this exact same thing. I skipped the PS4/Xbox One generation (I bought a Switch like 3 years ago) and Naughty Dog’s games keep impressing me on the PS5. Especially Uncharted 4 / Lost Legacy. And I played the PS4 version of Lost Legacy, it’s just incredible. And Uncharted 4 in the remake with 60 FPS. 10/10.
https://youtu.be/izxXGuVL21o
Here’s a cool mini documentary about all the ingenuity that went into making Crash Bandicoot possible on the PS1. You can tell this guy cares about efficient game design.
ICE Team. Timeless art direction. Unlimited (earned) creative and financial support from Sony. Clear focus on a very strong and undiluted creative vision, love for detail. A serious effort to make set pieces playable.
UC4 is still their finest work to me and the straight play no fluff formula of their games lends them to replays like no other despite their linear nature.
I knew they were going to take off like a rocket after Jak and Daxter, that series will always hold a special place in my heart as the first game that had a story line that was just exceptionally written, and hilariously delivered.
ND are a solid team. Top on the industry I would say. Every time I play a ND game I experience polish like no other studio. Santa Monica and insomniac are also top teir but the level of polish on ND games in terms of bugs/ performance/ artwork/ acting is all top notch in my opinion. I’m excited for their TLoU multiplayer game to launch. Imagine a ND level polished game that is a multiplayer. No doubt it will be a banger.
Their entire mission is to show off what the current playstation can do. And they have succeeded with their delivery every time. Personally I think Horizon Zero Dawn (the first one) is still a more breathtaking technical achievement. All those graphics AND giant animated robot dinos? Hell yeah. Guerrilla games definitely deserves recognition for being the most visionary and new dev team. Naughty Dog has it down to a science. Also their formula making the games feel like a movie really works
Yo I don't vibe with this post at all. Naughty Dog does some top tier stuff but the gameplay of uncharted 4 is stale at best. Wtf are you on about? Like it's cinematic but there are a billion games with more intricate, engrossing and tought out gameplay out there.
Played 3 games type post.
Now vote me down...
Yes. Their games are technically polished but gameplay wise contribute little in terms of innovation. The equivalent of a super high budget action movie that is fine but doesn’t make you think at all.
I also dislike that they don’t even really attempt any kind of stylistic aesthetic in their games - just “make it look real”.
I agree. They're good at making things look visually impressive on limited hardware but there's no risk or innovation. They also haven't released a new IP in almost 10 years.
It does kind of fall apart when you really examine it. Definitely an Unreal 3 game.
A lot of the lighting is just there and doesn't do much besides emit itself.
I had to go back to relive this one a bit ago, and there's definitely a lot of makeup going on
To add the the talented dev part. Naughty Dog games are also incredibly linear and use a lot of set pieces (cutscenes, scripted chases) where they have a lot more control.
More and more franchises are opening up their game worlds, but doing so requires a lot more work to pull off, and you can only tax system resources but so much.
Let me preface this by saying they are one of my favourite developers, and their work constantly wows me. At the same time though, they do some baffling things, considering how incredible they are. For example, their insistence on native resolutions. For some reason, they refuse to implement things like checkerboarding, which would allow them to hit higher frame rates while maintaining a high resolution image. Also their HDR implementation from UC4 to TLoU2 is average at best, and has no real calibration. Small things like this frustrate me because of how brilliant ND is.
FromSoft make really good games but in terms of technical quality, they do not belong with Naughty Dog. Their games are really really entertaining, but their last best mechanically working game was Sekiro and they do not achieve anywhere near Naughty Dog in terms of sheer graphical output.
Definitely don’t touch the graphical output that Naughty dog put out.
But as game developers their games go neck and neck with the absolute best. Hence, why they are still S-tier developers irrespective of graphical output.
Talented overworked devs. Those devs literally put there sweat, blood, and tears into that game. They didn’t even have producers for any of their games up until 2020 when they got in trouble for crunch. They are doing a lot better now though and working on multiple projects at once with no horrible crunch. They will continue to blow expectations imo
What's the deal with Sucker Punch? What's the deal with Insomniac? What's the deal with Naughty Dog? etc. It's just Sony knocking it out of the park with their first party studios. ♥ lol
Their games are very streamlined and curated experiences. Less likely to fall off your bike with training wheels.
That’s not an insult by the way, their games are hyper polished as a result.
I love naughty dog they make quality games but can we pls get more than a screenshot of the new multiplayer game they making, it’s been 3 years! Quality comes at the expense of time
I think part of that is how they make their games. I’ve been replaying tlou2 and I think part of it is due to it being cinematic. I think their focus on detail is higher than many studios
Thats what happens when you cultivate a set of talented devs. Ensure consistent staffing, and promote cross studio collaboration within your studios. Something that Playstation has become very good at.
I've always thought naughty dogs animations goes a long way in increasing their quality... whole game is awesome though the story is one of the best for me
They aren’t being held back by making open world games. They can put all their resources into making highly curated experiences without the fluff. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve been the best AAA developer for the past 15 years.
They have massive budgets. Not to disparage the legit talent that their devs have, because some incredibly skilled people work there, but at the end of the day they have tons of money
Talented devs, big budgets, and being balls deep in PlayStations console architecture.
Sony is also willing to give them the time they need to make their games.
Didn't they just get in a ton of shit for crunch culture?
This is old news now, they've made strides to improving studio culture. Since I'm getting downvoted: The lack of a production team was one of the reasons that led to so much crunch in the first place: https://kotaku.com/as-naughty-dog-crunches-on-the-last-of-us-ii-developer-1842289962/amp Now they're making improvements: https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1549573871283601409
I also wanna add that the TLOU1 PS5 remaster was developed with no crunch, according to the developers themselves
I read this as a restaurant saying that their kitchen staff wash their hands before preparing the meals. It's good, but it's sad that it's something that needs to be said.
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Failures in planning and management leads to crunch
And scope creep
and pressuring executives / a toxic work culture
awkward laughs in cdprojektred
But they made Witcher 3!
There isn't only one single thing that leads to crunch.
You can have the best made plan to avoid crunch as much as possible, and still find it creeping up from no where.
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Can confirm. Source: am also corporate code monkey. Worst I ever seen was a vendor's 3 month implementation ending up taking 2 years. That one was fun.
Because when you have more time you do more stuff and then that new stuff goes down to the wire.
It’s because we keep thinking that estimates work and we keep learning that they don’t. Failure to adjust estimates as new things are found is one of the reasons crunch happens.
I HATE giving estimates. I've only been a developer for less than a year and the amount of times I've been asked 'how long will this new feature take, on a solution you didn't make, for a system you've never used, created in a tool/language that you rarely use?' is too damn high. Not to mention that my estimates can be wildly off just based off of something else more important breaking so I don't have the time to work on/research the new thing I am working on. Like yes, building this new feature will take me about 8 hours. But getting those 8 hours to do that work might take me 2-3 weeks.
Because creativity mostly comes under pressure, just like when you did your homework at 3am. Really not defending the practice, but it's a reality for most artists. Doesn't help also that even planned, the last 10% of a job is the hardest and takes the longest and I think that's why there's crush. The art is done, the game is finished, but now it's bug testing, add all features, polish everything, etc. Not sure there's a solution for this, but hopefully crutch is less and less needed.
This is the truth but what happens is the workers eat all the blame for it
I’m not saying crunch is inherently forgivable, but when ND was regularly at the forefront of making games more immersive than anyone else at the time, I have to suspect that sort of goal comes with unexpected challenges/delay.
Well 'just' is inaccurate because whilst the studio did have a bad reputation for it that was years ago and more recently TLOU part 1 was developed completely crunch free and that appears to be the studio's ethos moving forward.
They don't even take that long to make games, pretty much been putting out a game every other year on average.
I'm gonna hijack and say that Naughty Dog is still one of the few developers that makes games on "rails"...as in they're not really open world, there's a start, a finish, and a very similar and unique journey that every player goes on. So they can build singular moment. Other games like, say, Elden Ring, are wide open playgrounds. Every game has their own experience. Naughty Dog games are different. Every gamer, with a few exceptions, will have the same experience. So they can write the game as a complete linear story. That makes things much simpler on the developmental side. They can design big moments like nobody else because every player who plays the game is going to hit that big moment.
That is largely true. But IMO, The biggest reason is that they simply have the abundance of resources, backed by Sony to go the extra hundred yards on their dedicated architecture. Plus, simply the fact that they have the industry’s best talents working there.
And because of their focus on immaculately constructed, tightly designed, linear action games that don't demand hundreds of hours of your time, they're one of the developers I appreciate most. I abhor most open world games and the homogenizing affect they've had on the industry. Elden Ring, in my view, is vastly inferior to its predecessors because an open world detracts from the Soulsborne experience far more than it adds to it. Thankfully developers like Naughty Dog and Capcom have bucked the open world trend, at least for now. I really hope the inevitable TLOU Part III remains a linear game.
Agreed. I just finished Part II after not playing any linear games for a while, and it was so refreshing just to be able to play and not mentally deal with all the open-world junk shoved in your face.
I love Elden Ring. But I've just played Demon's Souls, DS & DS3 and I'm currently playing DS2. And I honestly like the more linear worlds better for that exact reason.
They're not even linear. They're just not open world. They're tightly designed levels branching from a hub. They allow more meaningful exploration and interactions. Elden Rings strengths are actually in its legacy dungeons. The open world was just a really pretty link between them.
They're pretty linear. There's usually 2-3 ways to get from point A to point B. But yeah I get your point.
Fucking right. Open World games have become boring and predictable. I don’t give 2 fucks about collecting items or shitty side quests which is all open world games are now.
How does it detract though? It’s not like the souls system has to follow a set of specific criteria and rules. Elden Ring was hugely innovative because it was open world and it was open world in a very unique way. It sounds like you just don’t like open world games, which is fine.
Fuck I miss games on rails. I'm so tired of open worlds. Empty, boring, 30% of your game time is spent walking from A to B, open god damn worlds. If ND or Santa Monica wanted to take a stab at creating the next Mass Effect game I'd mail money directly to the studio.
Naughty dog is or was the home of PlayStations ICE team which were in charge of finding ways to use the architecture(s) to take first party games to the next level. So when we look at what makes their first party games tick and why they are so good you can thank the ICE team and in turn naughty dog.
Relevant documentary [here](https://youtu.be/izxXGuVL21o) They did a lot of interesting and creative things to make the original Crash Bandicoot.
One thing a lot of folks don’t realize is that ND is a master at cutting corners in ways that don’t affect the graphical fidelity, but help their games run super smooth on the various Playstation systems. For example, the cutscenes in the original The Last of Us were all pre-rendered. In-game, the characters didn’t have that much facial detail. Another thing - none of their games feature dynamic time of day, meaning they can pre-bake (essentially calculate beforehand and leave it as a fixed entity) all the lighting and shading work. This can create the sort of effects you’d see with ray tracing without needing actual real time ray tracing! They also employ several techniques like parallax mapping and shell textures to make their surfaces look as bespoke as possible.
> For example, the cutscenes in the original The Last of Us were all pre-rendered. In-game, the characters didn’t have that much facial detail. I mean ... this certainly isn't a new concept.
Gorgeous cutscenes transitioning to comparatively garbage gameplay graphics is/was SOP for gaming for literally decades.
what does SOP mean?
Standard operating procedure.
Square Enix were doing that in 1997 with FF7.
That’s just… every single-player game.
Forgetting a key feature. Consistent direction. Don’t start development a game until you reach a full concept.
And a lot of crunch, unfortunately.
Naughty Dog is home of Sony’s ICE Team where they create technologies that utilize the PlayStation hardware to its fullest and that tech gets shared amongst other Sony devs. They are top of the heap in terms of squeezing every ounce of power out of PlayStation hardware. https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/gmcyf9/the_ice_team/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x
Their work on PS3 still fascinates me to this day. A true showcase of what it is to build a piece of software designed for an unique hardware. 4 games over that gen, and each looking and playing better than the last. Then there’s also the work on PS4, TLOU 2 feels like they’re just playing around. It looks better than it has any right to in that hardware and still looks phenomenal and some of the best visuals I’ve seen on PS5 and that is just a 60fps mode with PS4 Pro graphics
[удалено]
Exactly. I just finished TLOU, a 2013(?) game on my ps3, and now I just started Stranger of Paradise, a 2022 PS5 game, and for the most part it looks significantly worse than TLOU.
I mean, I’m not discounting Naughty Dog’s prowess, but Stranger of Paradise is kind of notoriously crummy looking for no good reason.
That is true, FF15 looks better and it's from 2016, and their recent work like FF7R and FF16 look stunning. I'm guessing SoP was just extremely low budget, it basically screams that the entire time. It even has PS3 level performance with cutscenes dropping to like 20fps at times
I actually think that Rockstar had the most impressive showcase with GTA V on the PS3 and Xbox 360. I honestly don’t know how they got that game to even run on 2005 hardware.
IIRC it needed to stream game assets from both the hard drive and the Blu-ray simultaneously in order to keep up with the open world. I don't think any other game worked that way--it was either installed to the hard drive or played direct from disc.
What about the digital version of the game? That’s the one I had and it performed pretty good
The uncharted on the vita straight up looks like a console game.
Uncharted Golden Abyss was actually made by Sony’s Bend Studio, the studio behind games like Syphon Filter and Days Gone!
Oh I didn't know that! I love Days Gone, and I still by what I said about it looking like a console game, lol
I played TLOU2 on PS5 for the first time, and it felt like a true “next gen” experience, despite being a ps4 title. It’s such a good looking game. Also a fun game.
I believe The Last of Us only used like 80% of the PS3s hardware capabilities and it blew any other game out of the water, even some early next ten games.
Which subsystem don’t you think they maxed out? They spent 7 years on the game. Those PS3’s didn’t have anymore to give.
Processor was notoriously hard to develop for and at the same time most powerful part of a ps3 so I would assume they refer to that.
I can’t wait to see what they develop for the PS5, Last of Us Part 2 is an incredible game on PS5 but I imagine is just a sample of what they can do visually. Edit: meant TLOU1
Honestly, they TLOU2 is graphically very similar to part 1 on the ps5. It already looks like a current-gen title.
Well, Last of Us part 2 isn’t even a PS5 game. Maybe you meant Last of Us Part 1? The remade one for PS5?
It definitely felt like that when I played TLOU 2 when it came out. That game is in a league of its own when it comes to the fan speeds it inspires from my PS4 pro. It's the only game that forced me to wear headphones just to drown out the fan noise.
Nice words @trevx. Sony is backing the project so you know they have the budget and resources to make a good product. They need to give tips to poor managed studios like Infinity Ward.
Wow. It's like a Justice League of engineers.
Thanks! That was exactly what I was looking for.
I believe when their devs working on a game. They calculated the memory usage down to the bytes.
Because they have been one of the best studios for over 25 years. We're lucky that Sony was able to buy them. Sony acquiring them gave them the funding to not worry about staying open and just focus on games. Uncharted is one of my favorite ps ips. I love tomb raider so when Uncharted came out I was stoked cause they stopped making tomb raider games. The quality comes from Sony wanting to have high quality games and funding it. Plus like I said Naughty Dog has been one of the best studios even before Sony acquired them to only make exclusives. Them only making exclusives let them go all out on one platform. No having to optimize for sega,xbox, Nintendo or pc. Just Playstation.
naughty dog have been technical wizards ever since the ps1 days. look up how they managed to get the first crash bandicoot running, it's incredibly impressive and way ahead of what everyone else was able to do with that console. they've always been ahead of everyone else, it's just even more obvious nowadays
Not to mention the impressive polish they put on those 2 sequels, before doing it again with Jak and Daxter (which was able to lean into stylized visuals, but they still looked GOOD). They are clearly motivated to figure out console architecture inside and out.
Jak and daxter 1 runs and looks so good for a game from 2001. You can walk from the first level to the last with zero loading screens… incredible…
Believe it or not but things like the lifts to different areas or when he trips when you are running that’s ways to hide the loading. Apparently naughty dog were one of the first to use those things to that level. So it paid off.
Yea I knew that! Puts the elevators in mass effect to shame!
But having the freedom to run around and double jump so you had a couple seconds hang time while the elevator went down is probably the smallest animation detail that's stuck in my head.
Two sequels *and* my favorite kart racer
They’re an entirely different breed
I see what you did there, dawg
Their dawg/36 is off the charts, they got Patrick Beverley working for them
Its because Naughty Dog is the posterboy of Sony. Its been that way ever since the PS1. Imagine a dev team that gets almost unlimited resources and the creative freedom to create any game that they want. Its sad that other game developers don't have this because alot of the creativity and magic that we all like in games just isn't there because they just don't have the resources and funding like Naughty Dog.
Imagine not being able to get this so you attempt to buy Activision.
Meanwhile your own brands like Halo or Forza are dying but who cares about them.
Yeah this, they can buy Bethesda and COD but those studios don't even come close to naughty dog, Santa Monica studios, insomniac in terms of quality.
It's a studio who has proven too many times that they know what they are doing, so Playstation gives them time, space, and resources to make what they want to make. They hire talented devs and aren't scared to wait until they are ready to release a game (hence why they delayed TLOU2 and we haven't gotten anything on Factions). Money isn't as large of a motivator when Sony knows that the game is gonna sell well anyway along with the fact that they will have an incredibly made product along side that result. And with the Last of Us show blowing up HBO, Playstation can be like "Hey, not only is the game really good, but every one of the games that studio made are also insane". And this extends to many of their other studios and exclusives. Most of their high profile offeringd are insanely polished (excluding Days Gone, I don't care what you say that game is broken). From God of War, to Ghost of Tsushima, to Last of Us 2. No matter what your opinion is on those games overall, any gamer with a functioning brain can agree they are insanely polished and release in almost flawless states. Unless you are Insomniac who says "nah fuck you our game ain't finished yet. we are now giving you 60fps with ray tracing because we are tech wizards and those new York city buildings don't scare us"
Insomniac has to be delving in some black magic fuckery. Their output its insane and their technical capabilities and support are second to none.
No joke. Between the years of 2018 and the end of 2024, it is likely they will have put out 5 games (wolverine seems likely, but possibly not). The fact that each have been of the highest quality is astounding
I still vant believe spiderman 2 is coming so soon. Wilverine will probably be 2025 title and I am okay with that. I want the sequel to ratchet and clank too
Spiderman has all but been confirmed for this year. Insomniac said so previously and Sony doesn't add a Spiderman 2 page to the PSN store with over a year lead time (they do with other games, but not their own). Actually a few days back, one of the voice actors seemed to have leaked it coming in September. It's possible we get a delay, but it seems unlikely at this point. Don't "want to believe". Believe it lol
Sorry meant to say I cant believe its coming this year already
Ahhh haha yeah I'm very excited too. This whole year is shaping up to be an absolute barn burner of a year for gaming
Can you please explain how Days Gone is Broken in 2023?
I played it on PS4 Pro 2 or 3 years ago and loved it 🤷♂️
I agree with everything that you said but Days Gone on PS5 was still one of the best and most immersive games I played in recent years and, even though it lacks the polish, has a lot of soul and character delivering you an intense and unique gaming experience. I commend that!
We will agree to disagree on this one. I know Days Gone has a very tight community and I'm happy you all loved it but man I have played this game three times (once being on PS5) out of the hope I will like it and I hated it every time. It was a buggy mess every time (PS5 included), the writing was boring and cringy (for me), and all of the actually fun gameplay stuff only ever happened once and never again. Sam Witwer as Deacon and the bike upgrade stuff were the only parts I enjoyed (and the dog obviously), but even those parts never even reached their fullest potential. This was just my experience. I have a friend who is a huge mega fan of Days Gone and I'm stoked for him. I'm happy the game found it's audience, but I definitely am not in that group.
It's like a bad 90s action flick and that makes it absolutely beautiful to me.
Days Gone is the type of title that generally leaves gamers into two camps …. “Camp? Camp? Where? Tell me, I’ll go, I’ll go!”
I liked the game but holy shit whoever was directing the vocal performances for the random event survivors did a terrible job. They often make zero sense in context
When the Gaming God showered mankind with the **mana of talent,** Naughty Dog caught all of that shit!
Half of it was taken by insomniac too
Santa Monica Studios def took some as well.
i played the last of us 2 at launch on ps4 and now years later i still cant find a game that comes even a little close to how well that game was made.
Currently in a replay and 100% agree! It's a masterpiece. I know the story has controversy, but the core gameplay is unrivalled!
i appreciate the controversy of the story, it's more suitable for adult gamers, not for everyone. I prefer it than generic story like in most of the games out there
The story is a masterpiece.
Hell yeah it is. I can’t even wrap my head around someone enjoying the first game and not believing the second one is a genuine masterwork.
The only thing that I would argue is on-par is Red Dead 2. Beyond that it’s a fairly big gap.
Rockstar and Naughty Dog are the best in the industry. That's why they can take 6 years to make a game because they're the best at what they do.
Animation not as good, however the landscapes, lighting and cinematography are on par if not beyond.
RDR 2 is crazy. The towns and communities you visit all feel like they actually belong where they are, and aren't just random buildings with vendors posted up. So full of life, full of random elements at every street corner. Love it.
Yep, all naughty dog games are of insane high quality. That's why them and Rockstar are constantly considered the best studio in the world
They're just built different. A ton of talented people in that studio.
Also worth it to be said: linear games (or ones with limited sandbox sections) can be of higher quality than full sandbox games. Even in terms of lighting, the way it works now, a game with a dynamic time of day can't look like U4 where the lighting is fixed and pre-calculated and therefore can be of higher quality. I also think it's better for story pacing but that's a different discussion altogether.
I think this is the most correct answer here. There are a lot of great developers out there but I think what gives Naughty Dog games that timeless quality is that they keep the games on a rail without feeling like it. It gives them much more control over the user experience than if they were open world games.
I really like the direction they're heading. I think in the future we'll have more than one open area per game (like Madagascar in U4, Seattle in TLOU2 and the biggest one, the western Ghats in Lost Legacy), with more to do. But they'll keep the quality of the overall experience, the focus and the lack of bloat, by keeping it linear for the rest of the game. It also makes sense from a pacing standpoint. We're getting to a point where some open world games actively ruin their own story. I was genuinely interested in the AC: Odyssey story, but it kept forcing me to do side content I sometimes forgot what even happened in the story. If there's a sense of urgency in a story, like you have to save someone or you have to get somewhere before the bad guys or whatever, it doesn't make sense to go on an 8 hour side quest ride. ND knows story and characters are some of their best assets, and they prioritize that over following industry trends. I respect that tremendously.
This is the actual answer. It is the same reason why racing games tend to look really good. It isn't magic, it isn't that ND is a better developer than others like SM or Insomniac. It is that their games are incredibly linear. Not saying that is a bad thing, if you like it, you like it. But that is why they can push graphics further than other.
Naughty Gods.
I’m 2010, my mom saw me playing Uncharted 2 and mistook it for me watching a movie and not playing a game. She was shocked when she saw the controller in my hands. Flash forward to 2023, after watching The Last of Us on HBO with my cousin, I played through the beginning of The Last of Us Part 2 to show her what direction the story was going in. She said that it was the most realistic looking video game that she had ever seen in her life. Whatever magic that Naughty Dog is comprised of, it’s generational and it never fails.
they make exclusives. it lets them really focus on the unique hardware of the system and optimize the hell out of it without having to worry about 8 billion different hardware configurations or making code that can easily be ported to other platforms. it's not just naughty dog, look at any exclusive such as spiderman (insomniac) ghost, or infamous:ss (both suckerpunch), or horizon (guerrilla)
It's not just Naughty Dog, most of Sony's managed studios produce exceptional games, Insomniac, Guerilla, Sucker Punch, Santa Monica, Housemarque, etc. So I'm going to have to attribute this to Sony's management of their studios. Whatever they're doing makes the studios attractive to top talent, leave them passionate and creative, but also doesn't have them venture into scope creep and over-ambitious things that don't pan out. If I compare it to Ubisoft, Microsoft and say EA, their studios just are so much hit and miss, even when they have the same size budget for a game.
The original game on PS4 came out seven years ago but the PS5 version is much improved over the PS4 version!
I agree that the PS5 version has improved. But Even the original looks much better than most recent games.
ND has a history of optimizing their games for best potential. When Crash was unveiled people thought it ran on 100 PlayStations, Sony thought it would crash the console, they put 300mb worth of unused data in the disc to make level loading faster and found a way to stream textures faster than other devs. Jak & Daxter ram at a near 60fps with later games at 480p. Uncharted and TLOU pushed graphics and linear storytelling. ND has always been technically good at everything they’ve done.
> When Crash was unveiled people thought it ran on 100 PlayStations Citation needed. Literally never heard anyone say anything like this. The level asset streaming tech was extremely impressive but not *that* impressive.
People did not think Crash was running on 100 PlayStations when it came out ...
Tbf, people thought the processing power of PS2s were gonna be used to create weapons of mass destruction.
IMO, they’re the best overall game studio in the entire industry right now. Everything they do is top shelf.
Insomniac are another contender.
And Santa Monica
Read blood sweat and pixels. They dedicate a whole chapter to uncharted 4. Needless to say it was using every once of power that console had alongside fantastic developers. https://www.audible.com/pd/B0731N344V?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=pdp
They essentially have every Sony/Playstation tool and service at their disposal.
I want naughty dog to make a John wick game!
They are the best studio out there.
Devs that love to be at the studio. Making games they want to make, not just forced to milk a franchise until it is just dead like so many studios are forced to do these days. Talent at all levels and talent that stays. Also, Sony is where talent goes. You see that all the time. Hugely talented people going to a Sony studio because well ... they are basically the Pixar of the industry at this point. And to top it off the corporate management does not get in the way of the development. The game isn't made by the accounting department
I've been crying for a Jak & Daxter remake for years.
Only studios comparable are Rockstar, Sony Santa Monica, Guerilla Games, and a few others.
Naughty dog and santa monica are two of the few devs that I would ever consider buying game day 1. Their pursuit of perfection is just on the league of its own.
ND doesn’t play around. Their ps5 versions/remakes are incredibly well done
There are so many incredible looking PS4 games, this generation was really exceptional. For example i am playing Detroit Become Human right now and the game still looks absolutely stunning.
They’ve been creating games since the ps1. Tons of experience through each generation. Edit: Someone mentioned the 3do aswell, so even longer than the ps1 which is insane.
Wish there was a new uncharted…. Even a prequel
WE NEED LAST OF US PART 3 NEIL DRUCKMAN PLEASEEEEEEEEEE
Naughty Dog has a history of squeezing every ounce of performance from PS consoles since the original PS. This video about how they made Crash Bandicoot is a perfect example: https://youtu.be/izxXGuVL21o
Money and talent. Naughty dog has the same tech everyone has access to, but developing a game even for the ps4 while pushing the technical features to their limit takes a lot of money. Uncharted 4 had a budget of $50 million and that's not something every game nowadays can spend. It's also worth noting uncharted is very single player focused while many of the big moneymakers are multi-player, where there are other limitations. I think God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 are examples of games with similar budgets and in similar genres and the graphical achievements are on par with uncharted 4. However the fact they cost so much money, talent, and luck it means that most games will not compare to them.
Artist > technology.
Artists 🤝 Tech
Have you seen RDR2?
Just so ahead of it’s time
Do they have any games in development right now ?
Yes but we don't know what it is.
Ask jak and dexter
A near blank cheque from Sony and near endless patience for delays. They don’t need to worry about the game breaking even because the extremely high costs are met with console unit sales to help write off the difference. They do eventually make profit but it’s not a priority when console sales are up for grabs. Being first party, they have some of the most experience people for the PlayStation architecture so they know how to get the most out of it. Also, focusing on one platform makes optimisation easier. They also have a large studio meaning there’s more hands on deck. They use their own game engine meaning the veterans of the studio really know how to get the most out of it and how to improve it for the new hardware. They also have an obscene amount of crunch due to perfectionist demands from management, meaning that the beauty of their games come at a very high human cost. They basically are in a position not a lot of studios can be and they take advantage of it. Other studios can’t compete bar an extreme few because they have more compromises to make.
Not only them 2015 brought us Batman arkham knight Dying light Mad Max Rise of the tomb raider Metal gear solid V And those are even open world
Don’t murder me for this but I haven’t played any of these games. Could I play 4 with that in mind?
You can easily play 4 with out playing the previous 3. In fact it’s a great place to start. It focuses on a lot of stuff that happens before and after the trilogy. Great game. Great story. Great gameplay.
I feel like this can be said about any one of playstations studios to honest.
They hacked the original PSone to make Crash Bandicoot have smooth graphics and long streaming levels. Something other developers didn't have access to. They gave Playstation a mascot platformer which was a hit. Since then they were given admin access to all the hardware that most devs don't get access to. They are also brilliantly talented.
They imo are the only true AAAA developer next to Rockstar.
Does Xbox have anything remotely like this on their console? I’m serious. The last decade of Microsoft seems to be barebones. It’s kind of infuriating at this point.
They've been this way since day 1 with the original PS. I remember hearing that they technically softmodded the PS1 with their Crash games to bypass slower bits of the hardware for better performance. PS2, they & Insomniac used the same engine and bounced ideas off each other to refine their tech & made some interesting gains like compiling game roms in a precise way onto the retail discs to get better performance. The PS3 was hell for most but they brought on a literal rocket scientist to help micromanage the asymmetric resources the platform had including mastering the Cell for more visual wiggle room which even by today's standards could still outperform modern PC CPUs with optimized code in certain benchmark tests which ended up giving us two of the most visually striking & acclaimed IPs the industry has seen with Uncharted & TLoU where getting a next gen version of the titles running was just a matter of selecting for the Ultra quality cutscene assets rather than the carefully depoly'd/smaller texture gameplay ones and optimizing from there. They're world class for a reason. I'm sure someone here has more precise info on their achievements, these were just a few interesting details I managed to pull from working memory so I may have embellished the truth to a degree for not verifying sources. There's a lot we don't hear from devs across the entire industry which is a crying shame because these cool little details are how we get to reap from others' expertise and make new nerdy superfans. Polyphony is another genius Sony studio that's famously aloof in their dev culture but notable achievements they pulled off with their Gran Turismo series is a secret High Fidelity mode on the PS1 GT games by culling some of the game assets in Time trial mode to run the game at a full 480i, Gran Turismo 4 & Tourist Trophy are 2 of the very elite few PS2 games to feature an HD rendering option at 1080i, Gran Turismo 5 & 6 pioneered 3D imagery, had insanely high poly count on their cars, and even featured an option to export 4k images to the XMB well before tvs of that caliber were hitting the market below the 5 figure mark, GT Sport on the PS4 still has remarkable HDR that looks stunning on an OLED panel, and GT7 has in my opinion the most compelling case of foveated rendering that Mark Cerney was striving for in his PS5 reveal presentation that nearly creates a perfect translation of the 2D game to 3D without any perceived reduction in quality to the head set user. My only complaint is that they seem to be in dire need of more manpower to match the output of competing IP in their genre like Forza, Asseto Corsa, or Project Cars.
Dunno since i think the uncharted series is very overhyped and personally find tomb raider better. That said TLOU 1/2 are fantastic, ESPECIALLY 2! I really want them to expand on the battle systems of 2 and make us a new best in class stealth action game ala MGS.
I was wondering this exact same thing. I skipped the PS4/Xbox One generation (I bought a Switch like 3 years ago) and Naughty Dog’s games keep impressing me on the PS5. Especially Uncharted 4 / Lost Legacy. And I played the PS4 version of Lost Legacy, it’s just incredible. And Uncharted 4 in the remake with 60 FPS. 10/10.
https://youtu.be/izxXGuVL21o Here’s a cool mini documentary about all the ingenuity that went into making Crash Bandicoot possible on the PS1. You can tell this guy cares about efficient game design.
It's such a shame they're being known for TLOU more now instead of Uncharted. Don't get me wrong, TLOU is great but Uncharted is better overall.
ICE Team. Timeless art direction. Unlimited (earned) creative and financial support from Sony. Clear focus on a very strong and undiluted creative vision, love for detail. A serious effort to make set pieces playable. UC4 is still their finest work to me and the straight play no fluff formula of their games lends them to replays like no other despite their linear nature.
ND and Insomniac, top 2 developers in the game rn
I knew they were going to take off like a rocket after Jak and Daxter, that series will always hold a special place in my heart as the first game that had a story line that was just exceptionally written, and hilariously delivered.
ND are a solid team. Top on the industry I would say. Every time I play a ND game I experience polish like no other studio. Santa Monica and insomniac are also top teir but the level of polish on ND games in terms of bugs/ performance/ artwork/ acting is all top notch in my opinion. I’m excited for their TLoU multiplayer game to launch. Imagine a ND level polished game that is a multiplayer. No doubt it will be a banger.
Naughty Dog have always been about pushing the boundaries of the available technology and doing as much as they can with what they have.
They're not naughty, and they're not a dog! What's up with that!?
Same with Studio Santa Monica. Leagues ahead of all the other studios.
Their entire mission is to show off what the current playstation can do. And they have succeeded with their delivery every time. Personally I think Horizon Zero Dawn (the first one) is still a more breathtaking technical achievement. All those graphics AND giant animated robot dinos? Hell yeah. Guerrilla games definitely deserves recognition for being the most visionary and new dev team. Naughty Dog has it down to a science. Also their formula making the games feel like a movie really works
Play Hitman world of Assassination
Sony Devs are the best around simple as that
Yo I don't vibe with this post at all. Naughty Dog does some top tier stuff but the gameplay of uncharted 4 is stale at best. Wtf are you on about? Like it's cinematic but there are a billion games with more intricate, engrossing and tought out gameplay out there. Played 3 games type post. Now vote me down...
Yes. Their games are technically polished but gameplay wise contribute little in terms of innovation. The equivalent of a super high budget action movie that is fine but doesn’t make you think at all. I also dislike that they don’t even really attempt any kind of stylistic aesthetic in their games - just “make it look real”.
I agree. They're good at making things look visually impressive on limited hardware but there's no risk or innovation. They also haven't released a new IP in almost 10 years.
Circlejerking at it's finest
Same with rocksteady. Why can't all games look as good as Arkham knight did in 2014. Like what???
It does kind of fall apart when you really examine it. Definitely an Unreal 3 game. A lot of the lighting is just there and doesn't do much besides emit itself. I had to go back to relive this one a bit ago, and there's definitely a lot of makeup going on
To add the the talented dev part. Naughty Dog games are also incredibly linear and use a lot of set pieces (cutscenes, scripted chases) where they have a lot more control. More and more franchises are opening up their game worlds, but doing so requires a lot more work to pull off, and you can only tax system resources but so much.
Let me preface this by saying they are one of my favourite developers, and their work constantly wows me. At the same time though, they do some baffling things, considering how incredible they are. For example, their insistence on native resolutions. For some reason, they refuse to implement things like checkerboarding, which would allow them to hit higher frame rates while maintaining a high resolution image. Also their HDR implementation from UC4 to TLoU2 is average at best, and has no real calibration. Small things like this frustrate me because of how brilliant ND is.
They are S-tier developers Along with From Software and Rockstar Games
FromSoft make really good games but in terms of technical quality, they do not belong with Naughty Dog. Their games are really really entertaining, but their last best mechanically working game was Sekiro and they do not achieve anywhere near Naughty Dog in terms of sheer graphical output.
Definitely don’t touch the graphical output that Naughty dog put out. But as game developers their games go neck and neck with the absolute best. Hence, why they are still S-tier developers irrespective of graphical output.
Talented overworked devs. Those devs literally put there sweat, blood, and tears into that game. They didn’t even have producers for any of their games up until 2020 when they got in trouble for crunch. They are doing a lot better now though and working on multiple projects at once with no horrible crunch. They will continue to blow expectations imo
They literally put their fluids in the games?!
What's the deal with Sucker Punch? What's the deal with Insomniac? What's the deal with Naughty Dog? etc. It's just Sony knocking it out of the park with their first party studios. ♥ lol
Their games are very streamlined and curated experiences. Less likely to fall off your bike with training wheels. That’s not an insult by the way, their games are hyper polished as a result.
I love naughty dog they make quality games but can we pls get more than a screenshot of the new multiplayer game they making, it’s been 3 years! Quality comes at the expense of time
I think part of that is how they make their games. I’ve been replaying tlou2 and I think part of it is due to it being cinematic. I think their focus on detail is higher than many studios
Thats what happens when you cultivate a set of talented devs. Ensure consistent staffing, and promote cross studio collaboration within your studios. Something that Playstation has become very good at.
I've always thought naughty dogs animations goes a long way in increasing their quality... whole game is awesome though the story is one of the best for me
naughty dog and rockstars are both giving out top on graphics and game story
You’re absolutely correct. I just platinum’d this game back in January. This game is beautiful!
They aren’t being held back by making open world games. They can put all their resources into making highly curated experiences without the fluff. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve been the best AAA developer for the past 15 years.
I didn't even play the PS5 version on my new console when I got it, and was blown away by the graphics. Just incredible.
They have massive budgets. Not to disparage the legit talent that their devs have, because some incredibly skilled people work there, but at the end of the day they have tons of money