New video. No mention of the most impressive stuff in the game, but drives the point home very well.
John:
"It really shows them at the top of their game.
And it looks so good. Like I'm looking at footage of that chase sequence, the famous chase sequence they showed off at E3, right?
That still looks so good that it stands toe-to-toe with anything today. I mean, in some ways the footage of that running on PS5 at 60 FPS looks better than Bond that we were just looking at, right?
Like the level of detail is comparable, but there's just so much happening. The visual fidelity of all those objects, the physics, the speed, the post effects, the animation, it's just absurd."
"It was kind of like the height of the baked out era. And I don't mean that like in a in a drug-related way. I mean it in terms of like, lighting and such, where everything was sort of like hand-crafted and baked to become exactly what they needed when they needed it. Because it isn't a game that has things like dynamic time of day. It doesn't need to be like that. Like it's crafted to deliver a very specific vision from start to finish.
And man, it's um it really, really holds up."
Oliver:
"I really like all these Naughty Dog games and stuff like that. I really like Uncharted 4 as well. I'd probably put the TLoU games above Uncharted 4, come to think of it. But I mean I do like all of them quite a bit, I would have to say. But I definitely concur with John when it comes to like this a certain baked era of eighth gen rendering technology that we saw, especially in like single player games, single player action games, where you had like PBR materials, great lighting, volumetrics, SSR, and TAA, and all those techniques kind of came together to produce a very consistent and good visual look, especially when you look at like materials across a range of lighting conditions and environments and everything looking consistent. And then of course in Uncharted 4 you had the incredible character rendering as well, especially in cutscenes. Just absolutely fantastic. And then all the physics that John mentioned as well, like all the secondary bits of animation and like when Nathan Drake was shooting his AK-47, how the strap would jingle and jangle everywhere, and that was just so cool to me at the time."
"And then of course, I mean the propulsive sequences, like I mean I I think that what IO Interactive is doing with Hitman looks very impressive, but just like what Naughty Dog was doing in 2016 in that Madagascar chase sequence and it's something else. It really is something else."
"And I think that Uncharted 4 perhaps represents the peak, certainly a peak, if not the peak, of like this kind of very curated artist heavy game development on eighth generation consoles where we were still getting I thought reasonable returns for the time that was invested in these games cuz you know the span between Uncharted Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us was like less than a was about a 3-year span there and I tend to think that like we were seeing a deceleration of development time. We were seeing games take longer to develop but the rewards that we're getting for that increased development time were longer games with more sophisticated gameplay, more interesting systems, more like wide linear levels in the case of Uncharted 4. We were seeing much greater graphical fidelity. Like I felt like all the rewards were paying off in a big explosive way that generation and there's really no game that exemplifies that kind of trade-off more than Uncharted 4 where I really felt like that was putting in the work for gamers."
"But yeah, I think Uncharted 4 is still a fantastic looking game and compares very very favorably to a lot of games today and it represents like just an extraordinary level of artistry and just an incredible level of character driven action that really hasn't been arguably hasn't been surpassed since. I mean, there have been some games that have come close.
Obviously Uncharted The Lost Legacy expanded out on kind of the wide linear sections of Uncharted 4 and delivered something quite good as well but without the really explosive um set piece sequences that defined a lot of Uncharted 4's appeal and without as many narrative sequences. I I think there's probably a a good case to be made that Uncharted 4 is really a singular game in terms of what it achieves and in terms of the kinds of things that it was able to do on a you know, 1.8 teraflop PlayStation 4 back in, you know, 2016 and 2013 era hardware it's kind of unparalleled."