14 DAY TRIAL // Naughty Dog is currently working on Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, one of the PlayStation 4's most anticipated video games.
The company is known for delivering compelling experiences, and after having won pretty much every award conceivable with The Last of Us back in 2013, the bar is set pretty high.
With a brand new home console to play on, gamers are expecting Sony's best studio to come up with something that truly wows them, and the developers are working really hard to make sure that Uncharted 4 will be every bit as exciting as the PlayStation community wants it to be.
During a recent interview with GamesTM, Lead Designer Ricky Cambier and writer Josh Scherr have revealed a few more details about the upcoming action-adventure video game.
One of the things that Uncharted 4 will do is capitalize on the slew of improvements that Naughty Dog made to its already impressive motion capture and animation systems, tapping into the power of the PlayStation 4.
The power of the PS4 gives the devs a lot more to play with
Naughty Dog's games are famous for eliciting genuine emotional reactions in players, and for their great characters. One of the reasons it's easy to empathize with Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us, for instance, is the fact that their detailed facial expressions convey their inner states in a believable way.
The developer now hopes that, by increasing the level of fidelity and detail, they will enable players to empathize even more with the characters. One of the ways Naughty Dogs wants to increase the quality of facial expressions is by upping the sampling rate of animations.
While previously the animations were only sampled at 10 to 15 frames per second, in order to conserve memory, the developers can now record everything at 30 frames per second, thus making animations much smoother, without having to interpolate them through code.
More detailed facial expressions convey more emotion
In previous-generation games, characters only had around 100 "bones" in their faces, which the animators utilized to move meshes around. For Uncharted 4, the devs are working with 300 to 500 bones for each character, making faces and expressions much more detailed.
Actors Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson did a terrific job with their performances, and the technology captured their work and allowed gamers to immerse themselves into a believable world, with fully fleshed-out characters.
The newfound power of the hardware and Naughty Dog's revamped animation techniques will result in much more detailed and flexible facial animation, which in turn will make the bond between the player and the characters that much deeper.
Uncharted 4 does not yet have a release date pinned to it, but it's expected to drop sometime during the first half of 2016. Sony will most likely make a pretty big deal about it at this year's edition of the E3 convention next month, what with it being one of the most important PlayStation-exclusive franchises.