Striking at the opportune moment, Naughty Dog's award-winning The Last of Us is now available to PlayStation 4 owners in remastered form - giving both newcomers and double-dippers alike a chance to play the game in lush 1080p at 60 frames per second. For impressions of how the adventure holds up on next-gen hardware when played from a fresh perspective, be sure to check out our earlier tech analysis from Digital Foundry chief Richard Leadbetter. In this article however, we'll be addressing the returning crowd; indeed for those who loved the PlayStation 3 original, is there enough here to make the game's campaign worth another play-through? Is there more to it than just a resolution and frame-rate bump?
The first thing I'll say is that expectations going in were cautiously managed. I was disappointed to see the game absent from Sony's E3 spot this year, and Naughty Dog's roll-out of information prior to the expo proved treacle-like at best. In an earlier interview with Edge, creative director Neil Druckmann even conceded to the difficulty of translating the game's PS3-focused engine to PS4, where his team's emphasis was much less on adding new bells and whistles - and more on simply getting the code to run.
“We expected it to be hell, and it was hell,” Druckmann says. “Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every 30 seconds, that took a long time.” In the end, getting the game running as faithfully to the original as possible has proven a priority, alongside a simple image quality boost “akin to looking at a DVD versus Blu-ray.”
But having played the game extensively on patch version 1.00, and several hours of the day-one update 1.01, we can confirm this is a very stable, faithful revisiting of the original game. Not only that, but it's received upgrades beyond the bump to 1080p - an increase in resolution that makes it necessary to push draw distances out further, boost texture map quality, and add occlusion mapping to decals. For a close look at the game's evolution (and occasional side-steps) between PS3 to PS4, check out our head-to-head video and zoomer gallery below.
With under a year to turn this project around, it's clear there are some rocks left unturned on this PS4 re-release, but where attention has been paid the difference is huge. For example, there's a notable update to the opening Quarantine area, where building brickwork is vastly more defined and crisp. We also see zero texture pop-in issues as we walk around the jungles that skirt Bill's Town, with the PS4's high access-speed GDDR5 memory making level streaming a non-issue. This is as opposed to the PS3 game's reliance on pulling assets from optical and hard disk drives, which could produce the occasional pop-in.
Performance compared to PS3 is night and day. Infrequent drops to 50fps (with 46fps being the lowest on record) are the worst of it, most notably during the initial Bloater boss battle. There are occasional dips besides this around flooded inner-city areas, but the experience is predominantly on the 60fps line. Compared to the PS3, with its variable 20-30fps readout, we're looking at a frame-time reading that sticks largely to a sharp, responsive 16ms, while the PS3 routinely dips as low as 50ms.
On the 30fps lock vs 60fps:
Naughty Dog also offers a 30fps toggle, which caps the frame-rate to half the game's top-end refresh. Other Sony first party releases let players dabble with a similar option, such as Killzone: Shadow Fall and infamous: Second Son, though in this case there's really no need. Drops from the 60fps target simply aren't frequent enough to justify it, whereas in the latest Killzone it helps to avoid the regular lurches between 30-60fps.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-the-last-of-us-face-off
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