While it might be easy to think that many studios often work on games all on their own, the truth of the matter is that a large number of developers that belong to the same publisher often help one another out on various projects. In fact, one of last year’s most notable releases, The Last of Us Part II, actually received assistance from the studio behind another notable PlayStation title that launched in 2020.
In a new interview with Game Informer, Naughty Dog co-presidents Evan Wells and Neil Druckmann said that Sucker Punch Productions, which is the studio that has most notably created the Infamous, Sly Cooper, and Ghost of Tsushima franchises, ended up helping with work on The Last of Us Part 2. Although Sucker Punch didn’t directly do development on Naughty Dog’s most recent title, the studio did share assets that assisted the team quite a bit. Notably, Sucker Punch’s Infamous Second Son and The Last of Us Part II were both set in the city of Seattle. So when Naughty Dog began its own development effort, Sucker Punch sent over the work it had done for Second Son to help out.
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“Very early on in The Last of Us Part II development, we knew that it was taking places in Seattle, and we knew that Sucker Punch had completely modeled Seattle for Infamous: Second Son. We said, ‘We’re not going to use the assets in the game, but we want to quickly feel out the space, so can we get access to those assets?’ And they said, Sure,’ and sent it over,” Wells explained of the collaboration between Naughty Dog and Sucker Punch. “We were able to quickly rough out the environment. That was a huge help.”
Druckmann ended up chiming in with his own anecdote as well and explained that both studios ended up collaborating in another instance as well, this time when Sucker Punch was creating Ghost of Tsushima. “Another thing that comes to mind when we were talking to Sucker Punch is that we were talking about mo-capping a horse for The Last of Us Part II, and we were looking for ways to do it, and they were like, ‘Oh, we’re about to do the same thing [for Ghost of Tsushima]. Let’s double up our efforts,’” Druckmann explained. “Motion capture for a big animal is a big deal, and we were able to just approach the problem together and use similar data, sometimes the same data for both games.”
While Sucker Punch and Naughty Dog might make some very different games, it’s cool to see that both companies have helped one another out over the years. In all likelihood, these collaborations are likely ones that happen all throughout PlayStation’s respective studios, even though we in the general public may never hear about much of it.
