Game Dev DEV Interview: How Ratchet & Clank - Rift Apart Is Benefiting From Marvel's Spider-Man

[ZlleH]

How Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Is Benefiting From Marvel's Spider-Man

Interesting read. I'll highlight some of the questions that I've seen this board asked in other threads:

What's it like having separate teams at Insomniac with tech sharing, especially in exploring new ground on the PS5?

Well the tech sharing, for starters, has been an enormous benefit to pretty much all of our projects. One of the things that I think makes Ratchet stand out is that we've got this very feature-rich engine, that was in a lot of ways designed for photorealistic rendering for Spider-Man. And then you have these really nice well-designed tools and you put them in the hands of an artist, who has free rein to stretch and bend them to make something stylized. You end up with something that is hyper-realistic but also extremely detailed and high fidelity. I think that was one of the things that has always helped Ratchet & Clank stand apart from the crowd is that it has that bright, colorful, friendly thematic presentation that's backed up with incredibly high-tech rendering and incredibly high-fidelity AAA assets.

One of the presentation tricks you mentioned was transitioning seamlessly from cutscene to gameplay. A lot of people remember that from the 2018 Spider-Man, the opening cutscene where you go straight to swinging. This feels like it's the next level of that where it happens multiple times within a single action setpiece. Can you talk more about that?

So the entire game is rendered in real-time. Even our cinematics use the engine and that is both for consistency, and because at the incredible resolution we're now outputting, it's actually a much better use of our disc space or your download speed. So that's one way in which the game is able to look cinematic and consistent, but also as you've observed, we want to get emotions across during our gameplay segment. And there's a lot of cinematic tricks with how you use the camera and how you balance the sound, or when you deliver lines of dialogue that really enhance that. And we've gotten better at and more sensitive to how we can use the techniques available to us for better storytelling, even during live gameplay.

Where did the seed of the Rivet idea come from?

We knew from the very beginning that this was going to target the PS5. And we started asking ourselves with this notion of what the PS5's new hardware innovations are going to be? How can we use that to make our game better, and do things we've never been able to do before? The SSD in particular, stood out as something we could use to quickly jump you from planet to planet. And that would break design conventions we used to be constrained by. So from that was born rifts, and from rifts was born a parallel dimension, and from a parallel dimension was born Rivet. So that's the sequence of reasoning that led to it, but that all worked together. Basically a convenient coincidence that also made Rivet a great platform for telling a story about Ratchet & Clank because you get to see what happens when a Ratchet-like character doesn't have a Clank-like best friend.

What is the ratio of Ratchet to Rivet segments?

It's roughly even. Basically in the story, the characters each have their own objectives that they're chasing and we let you pick and choose which one you want to play at any given time. So they're on their parallel tracks, helping solve this big problem. And you can proceed through that at their own pace but they are parallel tracks. So it's pretty close to even.

 

[Bo_Hazem]

How Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Is Benefiting From Marvel's Spider-Man

Interesting read. I'll highlight some of the questions that I've seen this board asked in other threads:

Insomniac at $239M is the biggest bargain in gaming history.

 

[DGrayson]

Hey folks, lets try that again.

Less "woke guessing" and calling out other users.

VFX is verified, if you dont agree with him, refute him in a normal manner, but "calling people out" is never a good look.

 

[MrS]

Insomniac at $239M is the biggest bargain in gaming history.

No lies detected. These guys are doing phenomenal work.

 

[Bo_Hazem]

Hey folks, lets try that again.

Less "woke guessing" and calling out other users.

VFX is verified, if you dont agree with him, refute him in a normal manner, but "calling people out" is never a good look.

Hey VFXVeteran , hope you're doing good. Sorry in my behalf if caused you any discomfort, I sincerely respect your experience and knowledge even though if we might disagree in the "final" results. Hope you continue to share your knowledge and I thoroughly enjoyed your Ghost of Tsushima thread and many other posts.

 

[abel empire]

Hey VFXVeteran , hope you're doing good. Sorry in my behalf if caused you any discomfort, I sincerely respect your experience and knowledge even though if we might disagree in the "final" results. Hope you continue to share your knowledge and I thoroughly enjoyed your Ghost of Tsushima thread and many other posts.

I dont know why your appologizing hes simply a vetted pc fanboy who everybody knows loves to shit on consoles and lie about the techniques used his knowledge of graphics doesnt mean shit because his fanboyism is more important to him, he shat on demons souls saying it didnt have tessellation and said it uses good old parralax occlusion mapping which was false

Shat on ratchet saying the cutscenes wherent realtime and the ingame characters werent the same as cutscenes which was also awfully wrong. The game is fully realtime.

The guy is just a sore fanatic nothing on console impresses him even if its superior he will lie cheat and deceive on techniques used in console games and use the excuse as a veteran as gospel. I have no sympathy or respect for such people.

 

[nbkicker]

A

 

[MasterCornholio]

Shat on ratchet saying the cutscenes wherent realtime and the ingame characters werent the same as cutscenes which was also

I'm curious about this.

Was it just him guessing or did he say one of his contacts told him that?

There's a pretty big difference between the two.

 

[TrueLegend]

Honestly the developers must really be tired by now answering same questions reworded again again and again. Bottomline, they made good use of PS5's SSD I/O speed for level loading and character shading but they have not created new core interesting mechanics around it yet. They are looking forward to doing so in next game i.e. Spiderman 2. I think the stars are aligned. Gotta live upto that "Spiderman 2" name.

 

[Jack Uzi]

I’m fully on board with Doctor Strange and Wong being in Spider-Man 2. We need to get some portals going.

 

[TonyK]

I dont know why your appologizing hes simply a vetted pc fanboy who everybody knows loves to shit on consoles and lie about the techniques used his knowledge of graphics doesnt mean shit because his fanboyism is more important to him, he shat on demons souls saying it didnt have tessellation and said it uses good old parralax occlusion mapping which was false

Shat on ratchet saying the cutscenes wherent realtime and the ingame characters werent the same as cutscenes which was also awfully wrong. The game is fully realtime.

The guy is just a sore fanatic nothing on console impresses him even if its superior he will lie cheat and deceive on techniques used in console games and use the excuse as a veteran as gospel. I have no sympathy or respect for such people.

Even if he makes mistakes he also has more technical knowledge than you, me and a lot of people here. I like technical and graphic stuff so I wish there were more posters like him. Fun answers, GIfs, console war, it's nice, but a deep technical opinion, even if in some cases can be wrong, it's really appreciated.

 

[gow3isben]

They better not finna be completely replacing my boy Ratchet with Rivet any time soon

 

[mckmas8808]

Honestly the developers must really be tired by now answering same questions reworded again again and again. Bottomline, they made good use of PS5's SSD I/O speed for level loading and character shading but they have not created new core interesting mechanics around it yet. They are looking forward to doing so in next game i.e. Spiderman 2. I think the stars are aligned. Gotta live upto that "Spiderman 2" name.

Does every game need to do this now?

 

[TrueLegend]

Does every game need to do this now?

watch the developer interview on DF. I am not saying that, the tech director of the game said that.

 

[mckmas8808]

watch the developer interview on DF. I am not saying that, the tech director of the game said that.

I get that, but you made it seem like a bad thing that they haven't used the SSD in a new core gameplay way yet.

 

[TrueLegend]

I get that, but you made it seem like a bad thing that they haven't used the SSD in a new core gameplay way yet.

How on earth do you guys get that impression. Stop living in your bubble alright. I literally wrote, "They are looking forward to doing so in the next game". How can you read that in a negative tone? I am actually saying there is more to come....but people are asking the same redundant questions instead of being patient. This is the thing with many people on this forum, the PS5's SSD factor is great but for no reason, people have to pit it against PC and other factors like graphics and GPU prowess of Series X. Its engineering not Vodoo magic, and consoles don't feature cutting edge engineering. Ps5's SSD is genuinely going to do great things along with Series X SSD i.e. SSDs in general as they have now become foundational in budget gaming so we would have a game's mechanics designed from the ground up keeping SSD in mind. But we have to wait, R&C developers spend time exploring SSD's capabilities in R&C finding new stuff as they moved along, they didn't start with a full-fledged understanding of how it works in real-time development. Now as they will move to Spiderman 2 they will start with all that. Do all games need to do that? Not necessarily, but should they? Absolutely. Just look at the basic impact of the first thing that SSD brought, it literally reflected in the game's title "rift apart". Instantaneous loading of parallel levels. But it's on the macro level, once we start using it at the micro-level you can have things like dynamic foliage. For example, lets say you fought elementally on a ground cover leaving scorch marks all over the ground, now you can have granular debris of your armour/weapons mixed with jarred vegetation immediately being replaced after the impact of each movement leaving visible impact trails. And that's just me thinking...the game developers can bring so so much more. Winds that blow a cluster of objects instead of just one particle, you need fast asset streaming for that and now we have that. So yes instead of going 4k, 8k we need dynamic details in gaming now for what I would call a next-gen experience. And every game asking the next gen price needs to do that at some point.

 

[SlimySnake]

The bit about them The Spiderman engine is interesting. The 40 fps native 4k mode shows they aren't even pushing the ps5 you its max. I think Spiderman 2 is going to look absolutely insane.

When they start using primitive shaders and lower the resolution to 1440p with TAA like the ue5 demo, things are going to start looking fairly photorealistic. As good as avatar looks, i think insmoniac can easily match them just like how Spiderman looked just as good as division last gen.

 

[CuNi]

Hey folks, lets try that again.

Less "woke guessing" and calling out other users.

VFX is verified, if you dont agree with him, refute him in a normal manner, but "calling people out" is never a good look.

Funny how you said that in May, and now he has the "Professional Victim" tag.

 

[DGrayson]

Funny how you said that in May, and now he has the "Professional Victim" tag.

He left the site hasnt been around since early June so its really neither here nor there at this point.

 

[CuNi]

He left the site hasnt been around since early June so its really neither here nor there at this point.

I know, I think that's the sad part that he left. I know that people get funny tags when they either do something super noteworthy or something incredibly stupid, but I think most tags are made in a good sports fashion. I was just disappointed to see the mods join in on the bullying.

Nothing can be done about that anymore now, but I still appreciate your guys effort to keep it civil towards him as long as you could.

Edit: also sorry for kinda derailing this necro thread. If you want we can go over to dms.

 

[MasterCornholio]

He left the site hasnt been around since early June so its really neither here nor there at this point.

He's probably taking a break. Everyone needs to cool off every once in a while. Hopefully when he returns he can contribute a lot better to this community.

I always enjoy reading posts from industry professionals but not when they constantly derail threads. Hopefully he can fix that.

 

[mckmas8808]

The bit about them The Spiderman engine is interesting. The 40 fps native 4k mode shows they aren't even pushing the ps5 you its max. I think Spiderman 2 is going to look absolutely insane.

When they start using primitive shaders and lower the resolution to 1440p with TAA like the ue5 demo, things are going to start looking fairly photorealistic. As good as avatar looks, i think insmoniac can easily match them just like how Spiderman looked just as good as division last gen.

Why are primitive shaders such a big game changer?

 

[SlimySnake]

Why are primitive shaders such a big game changer?

These videos can explain it better than I can.



UE5's nanite is also likely using primitive shaders for their LOD management.