• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Sony Bend's PS4 game enters full production, has 50 staff, talks UE4, more

N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
This is from a Sony Bend recruitment advertisement on Gamasutra as noticed by stryke: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...dio__Benefits_Brews_and_a_Really_Big_Game.php

Most of the rest is a pretty standard recruitment ad talking about where they are and their studio culture.

This confirms some things we've previously seen strongly hinted at in job postings.

Bend Studio is aggressively hiring senior talent for a big new project. You might know them for Uncharted: Golden Abyss, which raised expectations for the Vita's performance ceiling. Or maybe you know them as the studio that created Syphon Filter. Now though, after over a year of preproduction, they're rolling into full production on a big next-gen PlayStation 4 title using Unreal Engine 4, and are looking for console-ready veterans to fill out the team.
Click to expand...
The company is fully owned by Sony, but has fewer than 50 people working there full time.
Click to expand...
The company has around five high level positions its looking to fill. "We're looking for a lot of different talent, but we're working on a PS4 title," says Chris, so console experience is important. "We're looking for some more senior staff people, who want to move to Bend and be part of this team. Animation programmers, graphics programmers, character riggers, concept artists... We're making a big push into next gen, and we need the best."

The company is also working heavily with Epic on Unreal Engine 4 -- in fact, Chris is on the advisory board for the technology. "That's been a huge boon for us," he says. "Because we're working with Epic in a similar capacity to how we've worked with our own studios. We've worked with a lot of the tech teams pretty closely. We're just extending that same kind of velocity with Epic at this point."

"We know that when people see this they're going to be blown away," says John. "We can boast that this came from our studio. There's a certain amount of innovation that's coming from the technology side, that just keeps us really buzzing."
Click to expand...
 
Surprised it's only just now entering full production, Golden Abyss came out ages ago.

Though Shinobi hinted that they worked on something else in between that eventually got scrapped, so this could still be quite early. Still, exciting to see them moving forward.

Oh and if anyone doesn't know already, it's open-world survival horror, but that's all we have on it.
 
I wanted to say this in the other thread but it got locked so I will say it here. Someone asked if there are released games that use UE4 and no one said D4. I thought that example was too funny not to mention.
 
bananafactory said:
Surprised it's only just now entering full production, Golden Abyss came out ages ago.

Though Shinobi hinted that they worked on something else in between that eventually got scrapped, so this could still be quite early. Still, exciting to see them moving forward.

Oh and if anyone doesn't know already, it's open-world survival horror, but that's all we have on it.
Click to expand...
Probably a Syphon Filter game.

The man behind the voice of Gabe Logan, at least in the last few games, has listed a game named ‘Syphon Filter: Spy Wars’ over on his official website alongside the rest of his extensive resume.

http://www.thegamescabin.com/news-s...-cancelled-syphon-filter-game-future-release/
Click to expand...
 
sn00zer said:
Its weird a Sony internal exclusive is using a 3rd party engine.... has this happened before?
Click to expand...

If we stick to a very strict definition of internal studio, I don't believe so.

The vast majority of their studios made their own inhouse engines for only their games, but that's not the most efficient thing in the universe.

These days they're doing some more tech sharing in that they have Supermassive for example using Guerrilla's engine, a lot more of their studios are multiteam (so at least multiple teams within a studio use one engine), and here they're expanding to licensing.

Also, I wouldn't be shocked if Gravity Rush 2 runs on a licensed (or at least borrowed from another first party studio) engine given it sounds like it's a PS4 game now rather than go through all the work of making an 8th internal PS4 engine or whatever.
 
sn00zer said:
Its weird a Sony internal exclusive is using a 3rd party engine.... has this happened before?
Click to expand...

I can't answer but I think it is good for Sony business-wise to test the engine on a PS4 exclusive, since there's a lot of 3rd parties who will be using it, and Sony's direct feedback may help work out the kinks.
 
If the dudes that made the PSP Syphon Filter / Resistance games are still there, then you can go ahead and stick your hand in my wallet.
 
If there's only 50 people, it makes sense for them to use a licenced engine, rather than trying to build one from scratch. I dare say the documentation and support would be better than, say, using Naughty Dog's engine, if only because ND wouldn't have designed their engine with other studios in mind.
 
Nirolak said:
If we stick to a very strict definition of internal studio, I don't believe so.

The vast majority of their studios made their own inhouse engines for only their games, but that's not the most efficient thing in the universe.

These days they're doing some more tech sharing in that they have Supermassive for example using Guerrilla's engine, a lot more of their studios are multiteam (so at least multiple teams within a studio use one engine), and here they're expanding to licensing.

Also, I wouldn't be shocked if Gravity Rush 2 runs on a licensed (or at least borrowed from another first party studio) engine given it sounds like it's a PS4 game now rather than go through all the work of making an 8th internal PS4 engine or whatever.
Click to expand...

It weird they currently have Naughty Dog's PS4 engine, Sucker Punch's, Guerilla's, Sony Japan's, and Evolution's available for use and they still move to third party. Im wondering if they are actually going to use it as a learning experience to help third parties in the future who choose to use UE4. Sony could use Bend's tech to help with PS4 optimization for other company's games.
 
Doctor_Thomas said:
If there's only 50 people, it makes sense for them to use a licenced engine, rather than trying to build one from scratch. I dare say the documentation and support would be better than, say, using Naughty Dog's engine, if only because ND wouldn't have designed their engine with other studios in mind.
Click to expand...

Naughty Dog also wouldn't have a gigantic support team across eight different studios to help out when issues arose.

Running middleware can be very difficult and requires a lot of scale. Unity is over 600 people now, both Epic and Crytek have 100-150+ people on their engines, and even publishers like EA who only support a small number of internal teams are getting around that number too.

sn00zer said:
It weird they currently have Naughty Dog's PS4 engine, Sucker Punch's, Guerilla's, Sony Japan's, and Evolution's available for use and they still move to third party. Im wondering if they are actually going to use it as a learning experience to help third parties in the future who choose to use UE4. Sony could use Bend's tech to help with PS4 optimization for other company's games.
Click to expand...
I think that's a benefit certainly, but I imagine the engine just also fit what they needed functionality wise. Like Unreal is built to handle a ton of different gameplay setups ranging from drivable vehicles to big open areas to melee to sidescrolling to platforming to third person and first person shooting, and if they're making a game with a lot of those types of things, there might not have been a great immediate fit internally, especially if they can't put 15+ people on an internal engine to add in all the functionality needed given they're only 50 people.

Like, I don't think any of the games you listed have you drive fast vehicles, move around an open world, and shoot in third person for example. Those three actions all have rather different technical requirements and the functionality might not be there in an engine that powers games that would never use it.

As an example of this, BioWare had to add the ability to animate quadrupeds to Frostbite since no DICE game ever needed it, and that actually requires its own engine level implementation to do. They also had to make save state functionality that would work for the amount of data you store in an RPG instead of just putting you to a checkpoint in a first person shooter or racing game where you only have a couple of tidbits to store (like your current guns/health/ammo).

But yes I think there is an extent to which having so many engines for similar games is not necessarily logical and dates back to a time where that made a lot more sense since performance was so tight that you only wanted what you really needed in there. A lot of these were independent studios at one point too so they didn't sit down and make a shared technology strategy from the get go.
 
sn00zer said:
It weird they currently have Naughty Dog's PS4 engine, Sucker Punch's, Guerilla's, Sony Japan's, and Evolution's available for use and they still move to third party. Im wondering if they are actually going to use it as a learning experience to help third parties in the future who choose to use UE4. Sony could use Bend's tech to help with PS4 optimization for other company's games.
Click to expand...

Well UE4 would have much better support than any of Sony other in house engines.
Yeah WWS share tech but UE4 would have better documentation and support team if they run into problems.
As well as being better for the game they working on since i a sure Sony other first party engines made with certain types of game in mind.
 
Just out of pre-production, so it will take ages until we see something :/

At least they stayed true to their word and are still a rather small team. A reason why they allegedly made handheld games before.
UE4 kills the tiny bit of hope that their next title would be at least multiplatform.
 
Oregon is amazing, and Bend is a beautiful town. Any developers that find small towns appealing should really start looking into this one.
 
Piggus said:
Well the town of Bend isn't exactly huge... It's probably still one of the largest companies in Bend lol.
Click to expand...

Sony Bend is in Bend, Oregon? MIND BLOWN. Never thought of it as a city name before, even though that's how they often do it (Santa Monica, etc)... thought of it more as 'Bend' as in 'turn/twist'.
 
Nirolak said:
Also, I wouldn't be shocked if Gravity Rush 2 runs on a licensed (or at least borrowed from another first party studio) engine given it sounds like it's a PS4 game now rather than go through all the work of making an 8th internal PS4 engine or whatever.
Click to expand...

Second son engine would be great!
 
bananafactory said:
Surprised it's only just now entering full production, Golden Abyss came out ages ago.

Though Shinobi hinted that they worked on something else in between that eventually got scrapped, so this could still be quite early. Still, exciting to see them moving forward.

Oh and if anyone doesn't know already, it's open-world survival horror, but that's all we have on it.
Click to expand...

And I'm already very interested.

I hope it's a legitimate survival horror game. Lovecraftian theme please.
 
Nirolak said:
If we stick to a very strict definition of internal studio, I don't believe so.

The vast majority of their studios made their own inhouse engines for only their games, but that's not the most efficient thing in the universe.

These days they're doing some more tech sharing in that they have Supermassive for example using Guerrilla's engine, a lot more of their studios are multiteam (so at least multiple teams within a studio use one engine), and here they're expanding to licensing.

Also, I wouldn't be shocked if Gravity Rush 2 runs on a licensed (or at least borrowed from another first party studio) engine given it sounds like it's a PS4 game now rather than go through all the work of making an 8th internal PS4 engine or whatever.
Click to expand...

Maybe a modified version of the Phyre Engine? They could have used Gravity Rush development to test its performance in PS4 in a real development enviroment and all that. I suppose it should be interesting to have it running well as soon as posible since there is a bunch of low and mid tier devs that use it.
 
sn00zer said:
It weird they currently have Naughty Dog's PS4 engine, Sucker Punch's, Guerilla's, Sony Japan's, and Evolution's available for use and they still move to third party. Im wondering if they are actually going to use it as a learning experience to help third parties in the future who choose to use UE4. Sony could use Bend's tech to help with PS4 optimization for other company's games.
Click to expand...

you should also consider that ICE has to learn about nearly all the engines to use it to help all the people they help. I'd assume all tricks being learned by Bend and their work with Epic gets funneled back to ICE and the other tech teams

Chobel said:
So I'm guessing it's not coming this year?
Click to expand...

Middle of 2016 if they want a good timing avoid all that year after year deluge of static IP's
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Lies of P Sequel has entered full-scale development
News 
21
160
HYDE replied
SIlent Hill Remake has entered full Production, Bloober Team also working on another game
41
2K
angelgs90 replied
MachineGames asking more staff to move to full-time office work
Opinion Business Game Dev  2 3 4
191
2K
PeteBull replied
Matt Booty Talks Showcase, Games, Studios, and More | Official Xbox Podcast
11
319
LavitzSlambert replied
Sony Has Helped Fund Over 120 Projects This Generation
Opinion Business Game Dev 
7
62
Hudo replied
Top Bottom