Alive and kicking

In perhaps the most over publicised instance of employee rotation, Naughty Dog has been painted as a doomed developer over the past few months. However, for every high-profile departure, there’s been a new arrival, including the likes of legendary Halo programmer Corrinne Yu. And now Assassin’s Creed III’s lead animator Jonathan Cooper has joined the team to help out on Uncharted PS4.

Before arriving at Ubisoft Montreal to animate dowdy assassin Connor’s tomahawk, Cooper worked at BioWare on Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Mass Effect 2. Writing on his blog, the recent recruit explained that the California-based company’s incredible work on The Last of Us convinced him to make the journey south, and that he expects Nathan Drake’s next adventure to achieve “another milestone in game animation”.

The state of the project at the moment is unknown, with directors Amy Hennig and Justin Richmond recently departing the developer. It’ll be particularly interesting to see whether we get a game demo or trailer at E3 next month, as we would have considered it a certainty a few weeks ago, but now we’re not so sure. Either way, it’s nice to hear about a new arrival at Naughty Dog for once – that departure business was getting tiresome.

[source gameanim.com, via eurogamer.net]