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Striking at the opportune moment, Naughty Dog's award-winning The Last of Us is now available to PlayStation 4 owners in remastered form - giving both newcomers and double-dippers alike a chance to play the game in lush 1080p at 60 frames per second. For impressions of how the adventure holds up on next-gen hardware when played from a fresh perspective, be sure to check out our earlier tech analysis from Digital Foundry chief Richard Leadbetter. In this article however, we'll be addressing the returning crowd; indeed for those who loved the PlayStation 3 original, is there enough here to make the game's campaign worth another play-through? Is there more to it than just a resolution and frame-rate bump?The first thing I'll say is that expectations going in were cautiously managed. I was disappointed to see the game absent from Sony's E3 spot this year, and Naughty Dog's roll-out of information prior to the expo proved treacle-like at best. In an earlier interview with Edge, creative director Neil Druckmann even conceded to the difficulty of translating the game's PS3-focused engine to PS4, where his team's emphasis was much less on adding new bells and whistles - and more on simply getting the code to run.
“We expected it to be hell, and it was hell,” Druckmann says. “Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every 30 seconds, that took a long time.” In the end, getting the game running as faithfully to the original as possible has proven a priority, alongside a simple image quality boost “akin to looking at a DVD versus Blu-ray.”
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