Naughty Dog keeping Last of Us, Uncharted engine for PS4

Console transitions are a time of renewal--fresh ideas and franchises pop up to fill the young consoles while there's still room to make a mark. Naughty Dog got caught up in the momentum when moving from PS2 to PS3, and it ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

"We scrapped everything at the beginning of Uncharted 1, and we had a perfectly good engine with the Jak & Daxter franchise," The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley told Digital Spy. "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."

Naughty Dog won't take the same approach with PlayStation 4. Instead, it plans to keep going with the same engine that powers Uncharted and The Last of Us, and tweak it as the need arises.

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"We have all these things that already work. Only when we hit a wall will we say, 'When do we need to change something? When do we need to scale it," he asked. "When does the gameplay, when does the story, when does the world that we need to create--when does this engine hit the wall?"