ZlleH
Member
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:
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.