“I guarantee that this game couldn’t be working on Xbox 360,” said Balestra. “It would be impossible. I’m 100 percent sure of this.”Speaking to Ars Technica, co-president of Uncharted developers Naughty Dog, Christophe Balestra, commented on the advantages of developing a game for the PlayStation 3, even going as far as to say that their upcoming epic action adventure game, Uncharted 2, wouldn’t be possible on the Xbox 360
Balestra then went on to discuss just why this may be, while also ruminating on what he and the team at Naughty Dog wished to improve upon for the sequel to 2007’s excellent Uncharted:
“First of all,” says Balestra, “we fill the Blu-ray 100 percent, we have no room left on this one. We have 25GB of data; we’re using every single bit of it.”
Not only does the Blu-ray provide Naughty Dog with the necessary amount of space to cram as much content on the disc as possible, the inclusion of a hard-drive with every PS3 sold is a major boon as well:
“The fact that every PS3 has a hard drive is huge for us,” Balestra continued. “It’s the combination of Blu-ray and hard drive. You can play the entire game without loading. We don’t require an install.”
Using the PS3’s specific architecture effectively is also a must for the studio, which results in some excellent results, as Balestra is quick to point out:
“We’re doing all the post-processing effects on the SPUs [Synergistic Processing Units]. The quality of the depth of field we have, you can’t do that on the Xbox. We’ve invested a lot of time maximizing the power of the machine. That’s our job, to make the PS3 shine.
“The ability to use the RSX [the PS3’s graphics processor] to draw your pixels on the screen, then you use the Cell to do gameplay and animations—we kind of took the step of using the Cell process to help the RSX . All those things are done on the Cell processor.
“It really helps us getting that quality of lighting per pixel; the amount of computation is pretty crazy.”
Balestra also noted that the ‘power of the PS3’ aids the developers in providing a more immersive experience, such as realistic sound dynamics and improvements to Uncharted 2’s artificial intelligence:
“All that math is done on SPUs to immerse players into the environment,” he said, adding: “We had a pretty good AI system on Uncharted, but we wanted to have more [non-player characters], we wanted to have also more enemies on the screen.”
Finally, Balestra was questioned about what the team would have liked to improve upon for the follow-up to Uncharted, to which he provided a slightly evasive answer:
“Sometimes people ask us about what is the one thing [we improved] on Uncharted 2, and it’s hard to answer. We’re trying to increase the quality of the game, so we’re design-driven. No matter what it takes, we’ll find a way to figure it out, to squeeze what we need to squeeze out of [the system] to make it happen.”
Uncharted 2 is out this October, exclusively on the PS3 if you didn’t know.
Source: Ars Technica