Naughty Dog will modify existing engine rather than build new one for PS4 development

Naughty Dog will keep its current in-house engine, with which the company built the Uncharted series and upcoming title The Last of Us, for PlayStation 4 development, game director Bruce Straley told Digital Spy.

In a recent interview, Straley said Naughty Dog will not develop a new engine from scratch for the upcoming console transition, something the studio previously did for the move from Playstation 2 to PlayStation 3. He said tossing out the engine it had at the time and building everything again from the ground up, rather than just changing certain parts as needed, caused "a lot of turmoil."

"We learned a big lesson coming from PS2 to PS3," he said. "There was a lot of hype over what next-gen was going to be. It was all going to be like movies, like a pre-rendered cutscene-style fidelity. That turned out not to be true. Granted, what we're able to do now is pretty damn close, but it took Naughty Dog four games to get there — one of the top developers in the industry with some on the most amazing scientists working in our programming department.

"We scrapped everything at the beginning of Uncharted 1, and we had a perfectly good engine with the Jak & Daxter franchise," he added. "We could have started with something there and then built off of it and only changed the pieces and parts as we needed, when we needed. And that really caused a lot of turmoil."

Straley said "a lot of weird expectations" came with building a new engine for a new IP on a new next-generation console, adding that the studio will not repeat the same missteps in the move to PS4.

"We learned our lesson in saying, as we move into development into next-gen, we want to take our current engine, port it immediately over as is and say, 'Okay, we have a great AI system, we have a good rendering system,'" he said.