I think this next paragraph here is really telling of the diminishing returns of chasing photorealism and relying on hereto undoable facial animatons and…spit…to…do something
“We will never rest, every game is the most difficult game we worked on, but we have “passion”. pay no attention to the massive amount of people who burned out working at Naughty Dog”
Anyway, I dunno if this will sell the game for me. I’m sure it’s alright, but I’m like a lot of people kind of questioning the prospect of remaking a game that was already remastered. Especially given that everyone recognizes that ND has the best in the business and can make the top shelf shit, but chooses to make a game for the 3rd time. Maybe an original title would have gone over better, but this interview sure sounds like they’re trying to justify the game’s existance. They could have just said “we got hopped up on slurp juice” and I would have gone “ah, that makes sense” but here it just seems like they’ve disappeared into their own tunnel vision, which is kind of required to run a game studio, but now they’re steering it into oblivion, which is what most Creative Directors do anyway…
I get the restlesness of seeing a work as “unfinished” this is the nature of making any art, it’s never “finished” and there’s always improvements to make. but its terrifying to go “yeah but what if we remade it again” and then follow through with that, given how god awful hard it is to ship any game, much less a AAA game, much less a AAA game from Naughty Dog.
Secretly, maybe they had a bunch of things they wanted to pitch to Sony, and they were like “Uncharted or The Last Of Us are the only IPs we’re going to fund anymore lmao” (which I have seen before) so they were like "well shit, we can’t make UnKarted we can’t make The Fast Of Us, might as well do a remake to try and shift PS5s.
When Joel gets angry, spit sprays from his mouth as the argument intensifies.
How could we make the world feel richer and more detailed?
“see how previously Joel was woken suddenly so in this scene has a little bit of a poopy bumbum because he didn’t have time to wipe properly. if you look closely at Ellie’s pocket you can see the bulge of the moist towelettes they scavenged from the diner in the lead-up to the boss fight”
It’s a bridge project, right? Give art and engineering teams work to move pipelines to a new system while a small core team works on pre-production.
Used to be this could be its own project (Rockstar’s Table Tennis) but now even a simple bridge project is a multi-year endeavor and it needs to justify any marketing spend so a ‘cheap project’ means you need a built-in audience means you need a remake.
We’re still trapped in that ugly middle between film production and crews that form and disband around intense productive months in a years-long project, and long-term studio work. Multi-project studios used to help but these big-budget projects have started to pull the attention of multiple studios when it gets hard. There’s always the dream of contracting work out to other studios within an integrated publisher but it’s always spiky, sporadic, and about half as good as in-house work.
Not easy to keep five million dollars a month of salary occupied. And now the product insists itself? gah
Meanwhile, From software totally coulda taken on the Demon’s remake or the DkS1 remaster as a bridge project, but they couldn’t care less about their old masterpieces and contracted them out instead (while churning out lots of entirely new games at a fast pace somehow).
Tolerating jank as the result of tricky production schedules rather than tolerating lack of creativity seems like a healthier approach, but I suppose Naughty Dog backed themselves into a corner with their brand of “absolutely no jank, polish only”
i think this is ungenerous… for starters sony and namco own demons and dark souls respectively im pretty sure!! like i dont know to what extent that would have even been offered as an opportunity for them. i dont rlly know what froms relationship w/ sony / namco / activision are but id think a lot of that would be up to the ip holders, which is what i think they are… i wouldnt blame kojipro for not remaking mgs1 either. i could totally be wrong of course but thats my imo
there were two not even that old life is strange games that were remastered into busted versions that had nothing to do with original developers for some reason
Wincing at how many hours this probably took to get right for a 2 second shot. Sure you may have a real time fluid simulation in there, Or maybe it’s baked and they have a higher polycount to pull that off. Either way, one visually reads better, one looks like you’re pouring some damn maple syrup in a tumbler.
due to the availability of new tax credits they have moved the setting of the introductory scenes from Boston to Sackville, New Brunswick. Joel is now Canadian
as a nod to everyone having thought that they voiced Ellie in the original release, Joel’s VA has also been recast to Elliot Page. The Canadian Film Industry is proud to receive this honour.
