During a live stream to show off Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, Naughty Dog has discussed the most difficult challenges porter Bluepoint Games faced during development on the remastered trilogy.
Naughty Dog community strategist Eric Monacelli was joined by series writer Josh Scherr and lead animator Eric Baldwin for the ‘Uncharted Moments’ session on Twitch, in which the trio played through chapters six to eight of the first game in the series, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, which included the legendary prison break mission.
During the discussion, Scherr mentioned that the greatest challenge Bluepoint had to overcome when remastering the collection was the need to completely reanimate the cutscenes throughout the trilogy. Scherr explained that while the cinematics were all originally rendered in-engine, these were then converted into pre-rendered movies to allow for minute visual adjustments to be applied that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Although Bluepoint initially attempted to simply upscale the movies in question to run at 60 frames per second, a number of changes that have been applied elsewhere, such as modifications to Nathan Drake’s character model to make it appear “less plasticky”, would be unaffected.
According to Scherr, the way in which the cinematics were designed in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune in particular was incredibly convoluted and “piecemeal”, and added that he “can’t even believe [Bluepoint] pulled it off, honestly”.
Similar to The Last of Us: Remastered on PS4, the game will also come complete with a number of control changes, which can be adjusted back to the original settings depending on the user’s preference. Aim and shoot have been remapped to L2 and R2 from L1 and R1, respectively, while the Sixaxis controls from the original game in the series have been stripped out – although the old grenade action is included as a optional selection.
