If you didn’t know, Uncharted 2 couldn’t be done on the Xbox 360. As is standard with the pre-release hype for all first party PS3 exclusives, someone has to say it and in an interview with arstechnica.com Naughty Dog’s Co-President, Christophe Balestra got to say those powerful words, “I guarantee that this game couldn’t be working on XBox 360. It would be impossible. I’m 100 percent sure of this.”
Obviously this has sent every fanboy in existence into a frenzy, but once we get past their arguments, Balestra explains just why the game wouldn’t be possible and gives us a great deal of technical information which only adds up to one conclusion. Uncharted 2 is going to be fantastic.
Firstly, as was stated when the game was announced, the title will utilise 100% of the PS3’s SPUs and to put that into context, the original Uncharted was only using 30%. Impressed? He explained, “the ability to use the RSX [the PS3’s graphics processor] to draw your pixels on the screen, then you use the Cell to do gameplay and animations—we kind of took the step of using the Cell process to help the RSX.”
The game takes advantage of the fact that every PS3 has a hard drive not by forcing an install upon us but by instead streaming the data to your hard drive as you play meaning there is never any visible loading. If you’re wondering just how much data this game will make up, it’s the full 25GB of a single layered Blu-ray disk. How much compression that 25GB has undergone and how much of it will end up living on your hard drive is unknown, but we can enjoy knowing that the game is big.
Other details from the interview focused mainly on AI and sound. The AI is hoped to be as real as possible with more on screen enemies and non-player characters than before. Sound will also react to the area around it with realistic physics being added to everything you hear. Though in the end, all of this only has one purpose: To immerse you. Judging from the atmosphere of the fist game though, that already shouldn’t be anything Naughty Dog have any trouble with.
Source: arstechnica
