PlayStation 4 Exclusive ‘Uncharted 4’ Aims For Photo-Realism

The PlayStation 4 exclusive Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End doesn’t even have a release date yet aside from the possibility of it being launched this year, and already eager gamers are getting tastes of what’s to come in the latest game from the Naughty Dog franchise.

PlayStation and Naughty Dog have been partners for some time now, and after releasing The Last of Us for PlayStation 3 and a remastered version for PlayStation 4, they want to make sure the hits keep on coming with their newest Uncharted game. The game, an action-adventure third-person shooter, will conclude the journey of its lead character, Nathan Drake.

The company is hoping to please PlayStation 4 users by pushing the graphics further than they ever have before and their goal is to make the game look as close to a Hollywood film as they can. While they already have some great things in mind, the graphics could be a game-changer. Naughty Dog’s Lead Artist, Frank Tzeng, told CG Master Academy that the game is already close to film quality, and it will only get better with time.

“Game quality is really close to film right now, look at the stuff we do in Naughty Dog. This character, I’m telling you guys, this character can easily be a digital double in a film. Based on the quality, the detail, the blend shape, the colour, everything that we put on the character [Uncharted’s Nathan Drake] this is basically a film character to me. So to me, videos games are getting really close to film quality, and this is exactly what I wanted to do.”

PlayStation 4 and its improved graphics and processing has now allowed developers to expand on their games, making them more visually pleasing than some gamers can even imagine. Uncharted 4 is expected to run at 900p resolution for graphics and maintain a frame rate of 30FPS.

“As we have more powerful consoles coming out, so right now we have PlayStation 4, it’s definitely more powerful than PS3 and that enables to put more polygons, you know, using more high-res maps and get more resolutions in a game, making more expressions making more blend shapes and wrinkle maps. All of this is getting us one step closer to the film quality that we wanted for the game industry and I think in a few years we can definitely get there,” Tzeng said.

To give PlayStation 4 gamers an idea of the cinematic experience that Naughty Dog is working on for them, these images were released just the other day. The black and white version is the official release, followed by a color-corrected version.

Naughty Dog may not bring the graphics of Uncharted 4 up to 60FPS, but so far it seems they are impressing the PlayStation 4 owners that hope to get the last chapter in Nathan Drake’s story by the holidays this year.

[Images via Naughty Dog / Gamepur]