http://www.gameplayer.com.au/gp_documents/090605SonySecret.aspx
So I had a really good chat with Richard Lemarchand, Co-Lead Game Designer on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves today. With the conference now officially done and dusted I can confidently say that it is game of the show. Especially since God of War III was trumped by Dante’s Inferno, Modern Warfare 2’s demo was not quite as impressive as Homefronts and because Avatar for all its wickedness needs a TV you don’t have to reap its full potential. Anyway, more on my E3 thoughts when I sober up…
Back to Richard: I was so impressed with the visual quality of Uncharted 2 we began discussing the game engine, which is called Naught Dog 2.0 by the way. I was curious as to whether or not Sony had urged them to share the engine about the other Sony affiliated studios. It turns out that the engine is all Naughty Dogs, but that there is another secret developer within the Sony family that feeds off all the advancements from internal and second-party studios to chip away on a base set of tools that are utilised across all games. These are constantly refined to maximise the strengths of the PS3.
It is called Edge Tools, and the development team that is working on it is called The Ice Team. Based in Naughty Dog’s studio, Richard described these guys as being the very best developers within the Sony family and their sole goal is to continue to make sure that the exclusives coming to the PS3 look like they have the Cell edge. So in a convoluted way, elements from Uncharted are passed onto other Sony studios.
It makes perfect sense, and knowledge of its existence can’t help but increase your respect for the way Sony handles its internal software development, even if it is slightly disappointing that it doesn’t help its third-party friends by passing on the goods, given the well documented problems multi-format games have had at the hands of the PS3’s architecture.
