Hot off the critical and financial success of Naughty Dog's latest release, The Last of Us 2,  Neil Druckmann was a guest on Talking Games With Reggie and Harold, hosted by former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime.

Talking about the development of the game, Druckmann commented on how the PlayStation 5 would help with a significant portion of future game development. "At the end of a 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." The Last of Us 2 is a technical masterpiece and also lets the player adjust the setting of The Last of Us 2 to suit various skill levels.

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Part of modern game development is hiding the loading of game assets as the player explores a location. This is done to minimize the amount of waiting a player has to do and helps keep the immersion intact. Games like Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Naughty Dog's The Last of Us do this. Though in Final Fantasy 7 Remake's case there were still significant issues with lower res textures and pop in. Typically games will use narrow alleyways, crawl spaces and ladders to help busy the player as the game world ahead loads in.

Ellie the last of us 2

The PlayStation 5 promises to minimize loading screens with the SSD playing a significant part, as recently shown in the game play reveal of Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, which loaded with incredible speed while characters navigated portals. "We do so much work, on our end, once you start the adventure, you never see a load screen." Said Druckmann, "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."

Sony has been touting the advantage of the SSD within the new console. Last year the PlayStation 5's Lead Architect, Mark Cerny, provided Wired.com an example of the SSD loading using Spiderman PS4. When played on a PlayStation 5 the game sees minimal loading compared to its PS4 counterpart of the entire city and other locations, all while running at a consistent 60 frames per second. The SSD is looking to have a huge impact on loading, game structure, and even game design as developers won't have to worry about keeping the player busy while loading the game and keeping immersion.

Druckmann is eager to see what Naughty Dog can do with the new upcoming console, "When you start a new generation, it's a double-edged sword, 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."

Naughty Dog is currently giving its employees a break after the games release and there's no word yet on if the developer's next project will be elusively next gen, but it's exciting to think what the developer can do as the PlayStation 5 promises to have loading speeds 100 times faster.

The Last of Us 2 is available now on PlayStation 4.

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Source: SoundCloud