One of the many technological achievements of The Last of Us Part II is that the player never sees a loading screen in-game. Druckmann touched on how hard devs have to work to lay out levels in a certain way to achieve this, but with the PS5’s SSD, it won’t be as constrained.
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How the PS5 will affect Naughty Dog development
“At the end of a [console] generation, you always feel the constraints. You always feel like you’re pushing against a bunch of walls and finding the little cracks where you can take things a little further whether it’s memory or CPU or hard drive speed. When you start a new generation, it’s a double-edged sword,” Druckmann said. He continued, “On the one hand, you have to build new tech for the new hardware, and that can be an uphill battle. But on the other hand, all of a sudden you feel this freedom of, ‘Oh my god, we can breathe again!’ ‘We can break away from these constraints.’ And one of the things that we’re excited by is the solid-state hard drive and what it means for almost seamless loading.” As of right now, the Naughty Dog crew is taking a breather after launching one of the biggest PS4 titles to date. Naughty Dog has stated that it will be working on a separate online endeavor, which, at this point, will likely come to the PS5. We also suspect The Last of Us Part II will be hopping on PS5 at some point (60 frames per second, please and thank you). “We do so much work, on our end, once you start the adventure, you never see a load screen. And there’s so much work that happens behind the scenes of how we design the levels, how we chop them up, and it’s all invisible to the player; you never see any of that work,” he continued. “But now, knowing that we’re going to be able to load things more quickly, it just means the designers don’t have to be as constrained by how they lay things out. How we think about things. When we load new characters. So I’m excited to see the doors that opens for us.” Stay tuned for more Naughty Dog goodies down the road.
