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It’s a sentiment echoed by head of technology Michiel van der Leeuw, who also believes that the new system allowed the studio to be more imaginative. “You always run into a moment with hardware where you’re limited and you have to tell the designers that you can’t do that or you can have this,” he beamed. “However, this time you can have everything, and it allows us to do much more.”
The lead continued that the improved architecture allowed it to get up and running faster than ever before, too. “We’re the ones that are making a launch title, so we’ve got all of the bumps along the way,” he admitted. “But it’s surprising for a launch title how easy it’s been to adapt to the console. We’ve been very much able to port things and from day one have been able to improve the quality, make the environments bigger, improve the draw distance, and more.”
Most importantly, though, what has changed since February? “Since the PlayStation Meeting, the lighting has improved, the frame rate has improved, there have been a lot of changes to character animation and streaming, and texture quality is now about four times higher than it was back then, so it’s come a long way.” Perhaps the most exciting thing is that you’ll be able to see it all for yourself in less than a month...
