PS5 Power: Insomniac Dev Says Ratchet Is 'Tip of the Iceberg' - Next-Gen Console Watch

[Music] hello and welcome to next gen console watch our show here at ign covering all the biggest news rumors and releases in the world of the xbox series and playstation 5. i'm your host for this week jonathan dornbush filling in for damon hatfield who is a little bit busy with things known as e3 in the summer of gaming but we've got a great show for you nonetheless i'm joined as always by ryan mccaffrey the host of podcast unlock good to see you jonathan and we're also joined this week by special guest mike fitzgerald the director of core technology at insomniac games happy to be here mike thank you so much for joining us of course to talk about ratchet and clank rift apart which is uh coming out today as the show airs congratulations to you and the team on the launch thank you so much uh we're we're very excited to talk to you about it uh i of course reviewed it on ign and ryan has been playing it and uh spoilers has been loving it as well so we're really so good we're really excited to jump in and talk to you a little bit about uh the game and i i wanted to sort of start off on a note of you know this is obviously not the first game in even a short window that insomniac has made for the playstation 5 with spider-man miles morales and the spider-man remastered version but uh this is the first ps5 exclusive and i was sort of wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about just in general obviously broad strokes because i could understand it could get really into detail but sort of how um how developing for the ps5 has differed a little bit for things on the ps4 and you know what's changed a little bit what's been smoothed out with with the new technology well the extra six months has given us a lot of time even in that you know range to really focus on what we can double down on from a technical standpoint and how to leverage it better um you know i think it was uh there's a lot of work there to support you know both consoles at once make sure you're delivering the same awesome experience on both of them uh and even just making a game in general it can be a lot of work and a lot of time so um it was nice to take a step back after shipping the watch titles and see what we could drill down on specifically we you know worked extra hard to leverage the ssd and a lot of the i o technology there to deliver something unique and spectacular for this game well kind of on that note mike i'm curious if the you know the the ps5 itself kind of changed the the development pipeline at all like it's like you got to think about the 3d audio and and the aforementioned ssd so does that like sort of fundamentally change the approach to the technical design of the game you know it's actually been a really great console to develop for um the the platform teams did an awesome job taking the development kit from the playstation 4 bringing a lot of that process forward to the playstation 5. it is really easy to get up and get going and you know just having some of that extra cpu power and gpu power it's easy to leverage and then getting to you know it makes it easy to then spend a lot of time focusing on the things that make your game special as opposed to just getting it up and working and it feels like in particular the ratchet and clank franchise is someone who's you know been playing it since the ps2 days it feels really tailor-made to some of the the added bells and whistles and the benefits of the ps5 uh like ryan was mentoring 3d audio but but also the the dual sense um i i was sort of wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about the team's approach to those two aspects specifically um because i i can imagine you wanna bring these these wacky weapons that that are so synonymous with thrashing and climbing to life but you also wanna make sure the feedback that players are are getting is engaging but it's like a new spectrum that you're able to offer with this uh the dual sense yeah i'd say as soon as we heard you know what the team was trying to deliver with the controller we knew that it would be absolutely perfect for ratchet and for all the different weapons and really getting to do some creative experiences there and honestly it it added another factor to take in as you're working on that 20 weapons in the game what do they all do they need to have these gameplay effects they also need to sound and look different okay they also need to feel different too and use different parts of the controller but it was a really fun process for the team to you know think of creative ideas and things to do differently and how to make them feel unique so it definitely was one where as soon as we heard about the controller we were excited to apply it to everything in this game you remember what the first uh weapon you guys prototyped up on dual sense was to really kind of test out what it could look like in the game and feel like i don't remember exactly i know that that topiary sprinkler uh weapon is one of the first ones we showed because it's one of the first ones that uh that people were so excited about the idea of and there's so many different things happening with that you know you fire it out it lands it sprouts things it shoots water uh and working on getting all those feelings coming through the controller was was a blast for the team how about on the the level design side of of the the technical aspect of it particularly i mean obviously the going into the ps5 it was all about ssd was going to be this huge feature that was going to come as close to eliminating loading times as possible and you guys pretty much nailed that with rift apart i mean jonathan's played the whole thing i'm halfway or so through i mean does uh does that ssd sort of change the team's approach to either crafting the planets or or integrating cinematics into the game at all it's actually been it's interesting it's you think about okay i have an ssd in this console i know it's going to be faster than a spinning hard drive was maybe it'll be like our pcs and we know how ssds are faster but there's all this other tech surrounding it to really integrate it in the rest of the hardware that lets it do do more and so as working on this game it was this constant process of surprising ourselves with how much more we can get out of it right so you could you can try and load all the same files okay they come back to you sooner but we also have the ability to tell it to load tens of thousands of files and it figures out when like how to get them most efficiently and send them to us okay that made our things load twice as fast just finding this this that hey i think we can load a level in two seconds i think we can load a level in one second i think we can do it in a half a second and not only from a gameplay perspective but as you mentioned from a cinematic perspective um it lets us do things like camera cuts to new you know you can do a camera cut to a new place in a game because you'd need three seconds to load what's over there unless you worked you know tirelessly to make this tiny little perfectly framed thing you could keep loaded and now we can just sort of that's a tool in our tool belt for those um those screen wipes that we have there are something you know it would have been really hard to do as you're traveling from planet to planet in this game we can do these sort of star wars style wipes across the screen that you know it's something cinematic that it take it took our animators and teams a while to remember oh yeah i don't have all these limitations i used to have i usually have when making games there's things i can do if i were making movies well and yeah it's those wipes in particular when you're when you're going from one to the other and you're switching between ratchet and rivet and in my head when with the first time it happened i was like oh it'll be you know a second or two kind of like we'll see a vista and it'll maybe pause for a little bit but it just it gets right back into the action and right into these worlds and they're also i think uh then obviously correct me if i'm wrong but some of these certainly feel like the biggest worlds that i can remember playing in a ratchet and clank game was the the size and the scope because we we also it seems like battles are bigger than ever and there there's more going on in all the battles was was all of that increase in scope sort of tied to what the ps5 was able to let the team do in in terms of adding more but making sure it was valuable on screen at any given time we always knew we could do more and i think one thing to remember is we start working on these games before we have the hardware before we have the engine running on the hardware um we can't we don't know exactly how it's going to perform or what we're going to be able to do and for this one it was sort of like well let's let's aim high let's make you know more detailed models than we'd ever make more detailed textures than we'd ever make design some crazy encounters um and and sort of challenged ourselves to to meet that so it's been exciting to take some things like that for the franchise in a bit further direction and push it further than it could go before well kind of on that note mike i'm curious uh you know games every generation have always gotten better looking as the generation goes on developers get a better feel for the hardware the sdk and toolsets mature how much untapped hardware potential do you think is still there for future ratchet games there's so much there's so much i look at even you know what we've done with the ssd and loading in this game just feels like the tip of the iceberg i we can we can get a lot more out of that hardware that i'm excited about um you know from a rendering potential we as a studio have used ray tracing for reflections and tried to you know lean into some of that ability quite a bit and i think there's a lot farther we can take that as well so it's going to be a fun you know however many years of leveraging this hardware and and trying to do some more spectacular things with that yeah is speaking to the sort of added visual benefits as is uh present on ryan's screen and also a lot of my play time after i beat the game i've sort of been obsessed with photo mode because not only do you get to see so much of the incredible detail that the team has put into it but even as you were mentoring things like retracing like the the reflections of uh nefarious city that i can see in ratchet's eye or on a helmet it's just literally just my game right now that's all this is this is just photo mode this isn't this is my actual this is where i left off in the game right now i love it and it's it's this incredible level detail that i i was especially curious about obviously the the titular riffs to discuss uh just a little bit about um you know you're talking about the the ability to load a planet or load a level um from one to the other as we're going through cinematics but of course that happens with the rifts as well um was integrating that sort of experience of that seamless loading uh a really big challenge for for the gameplay side of it because you know i i love the mini boss battles or the boss battles where you're on a planet and then you end up somewhere else in the midst midst of the fight yeah that there were a lot of um really odd challenges that came up with that i'm trying to think of a good example so you know we model those things as you know they're two different worlds and the character falls right through it needs to feel like they're in one contiguous space the whole time but at some point the game is saying you know you're not here anymore now you're over you know thousands of meters away or arbitrarily far away in world space for the characters and that means you know if you just and you're also moving the camera or sometimes the camera is on one side of the portal the characters on the other technically they're thousands of meters away in the game world but they need to look like they're up close and maintaining that making sure that moment where you move through where your camera moves through is seamless the motion blur stays working the um you know the depth of field all looks perfect through those areas we're making you know you're going from a light area to a dark area and there's no jarring there uh no jarring transition there took a ton of work for the gameplay teams um the and the technical teams mike which came first the the rifts or or the ssd like was did you guys get the sort of paper top level ps5 spec and like hey we're going to do this ssd thing with this incredible io and then build the riff stuff around that or did the rift aspect of design come in later after it became evident what the ps5 was going to be capable of our creative team um i believe got a bit of a heads up on on some of the features of the console just to think about how we could leverage them and i think it dovetailed nicely with you know we want to introduce this franchise to new players so it's great to have some new characters and and new uh you know introductions for people and that idea of okay fast loading well different dimensions and plants and areas and these things just sort of fell together really really nicely so from the conception of the project earlier in the project the uh the riffs and the and the hopping from world to world was definitely part of it yeah what i really love especially as an old-time ratchet fan is seeing the blend of old and new not just the characters and and the storytelling but also the evolution of insomniac as a whole was can you speak at all of whether it was technology of you know the team has a few open world games under their belt now especially with the the spider-man games did that thought process or did lessons learned from the spider-man games uh affect rift apart in any major way that you can speak to yeah especially on the engine uh and tools team we try and make sure we're building up technology for one game and bringing it forward to the next one and the next one and that's what gives us you know the ability to do better and better things each time and think in new directions so some of the worlds in this game they're big because we can use an open world style streaming and loading system we can add more detail in places because we don't always need to have it around and then i would say too from a cinematic direction and and uh storytelling standpoint we really pushed ourselves as the studio on the two spiderman titles and i think you see that come to this game as well well mike i mean on that note are you what you're saying is i'm going to translate for you for the audience here is that there's nothing stopping you from now doing a and into the spider-verse spider-man game with this where we can just hop between between spider verses right uh well let me get my notepad over here yeah let's get the product roadmap out but theoretically you could apply this to spider-man or anything else you guys want to do well i think you know i've heard some people say that i think we're going to apply this tech in some ways that we haven't even thought about yet right there's some really cool technical underpinnings to it that don't only involve i opened a hole and i walk through the hole and i'm in a different place um you know and so those camera wipes are one being able to do camera cuts to new areas and games to deliver some of the same cinematic techniques you just you can imagine intercutting between two different sides of of a city or a different place so whatever we do next i think we'll we'll get to leverage some of this in a really new cool way that people aren't expecting and i i think uh rift apart was absolutely full of those experiences as well and so i'm i'm so excited to see what what the future holds for for future insomniac games but with this one in particular for people to finally get their hands on it and and dive into the incredible experience that you've all put together uh so mike thank you so much for joining us today really really appreciate your time and congratulations to you and the team on the launch of rift apart thank you so much and it's been awesome to have you guys play it and uh we're so excited for players to play it as well before we go of course we have our poll results for you this week uh last week's poll was which e3 conference are you most excited for ubisoft eas devolvers or microsoft and by a wide margin microsoft won with 69.1 percent of the poll uh trailing behind there uh thank you ryan uh ubisoft trailing behind at 15.6 percent uh followed by ea and then devolver uh ryan obviously this is our last show before uh we'll be covering the microsoft conference next week and and everything that was announced there and elsewhere but uh it's it's no surprise to me they have so much potential right now i'm not surprised the audience is that excited what about you that's a good way to put it i mean ubisoft has already telegraphed a lot of what they're going to show i'm sure they'll still have surprises but they've said hey we're going to have more far cry 6 and we'll have rainbow six the newly renamed rainbow six extraction uh whereas microsoft you're right it's still there's a lot of mystery there it's like okay yeah halo will assume that much but will starfield be shown will other bethesda stuff be shown what about some of microsoft's new studios that we haven't heard from like in exile and compulsion so yeah there's there's still a lot a lot left that's not on the table that hopefully we'll get to see from microsoft this weekend and yeah we'll uh join us the unlocked crew is going to be live uh starting at 9 30 a.m pacific 12 30 p.m eastern on sunday june 13th so we'll have our pre-show where we're going to talk about a lot more of this a lot of what we think we're going to see what we hope to see and then we'll roll right into the conference just stay right there and watch and then we'll go as soon as it ends we come right out and we'll uh we'll talk through and analyze everything we just saw i just personally hope they find a way to get keanu to show up again cyberpunk related or not he's just a great addition to any show but uh yes they they've been doing a fantastic string of conferences the last few years and i'm very excited to watch that as well as all of the e3 showcases uh and and much more going on so please stay tuned to ign for all of our summer of gaming coverage we have a ton of reveals breakdowns uh conference coverage and so much more to bring to you over the coming days but of course we'll we'll have a poll for you this week as well uh with ratchet clank rift part being one of the the longest-running playstation franchises getting new additions right now we wanted to know which long-running playstation franchise maybe some of the uh mascots that were teased as part of a rift apart tie-in on twitter recently if you maybe have seen that uh which franchise would you like to see return on the playstation 5 next be sure to vote in our poll on ign.com and we'll have the results for you next week along with all of the coverage of the amazing stuff happening over the next few days but uh ryan thank you so much for joining me for this week always and uh thank you to everyone out there watching next gen console watch every week and thank you to our guest mike fitzgerald of course for joining us again as well this week remember next-gen console watch is live every friday at 9 00 a.m eastern 6 a.m pacific on ign and youtube so be sure to tune in but thank you so much for watching you

Channel: IGN

Views: 112,476

Rating: 4.8678584 out of 5

Keywords: next gen console watch, ign console watch, console watch ign, ps5, playstation 5, ratchet clank rift apart, rift apart impressions, mike fitzgerald insomniac, ign insomniac interview, ign mike fitzgerald, ign rift apart interview, ps5 power, rift apart ps5 power, ratchet clank rift apart graphics, ratchet clank rift apart ps5, ps5 new exclusives, ratchet clank dualsense, rift apart ssd tech, insomniac games spiderverse, playstation exclusive games, rift apart dev interview

Id: mGoPspHRXss

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheCounsler]

Hell yes, we just getting started

[u/Kell_215]

Always thought an into the spider verse game would be cool but now I want it more than ever😭

[u/luccasalomone11]

That part in the beginning where they flex the SSD by having you go through 5 different maps with like a second of “loading” was fucking lit mate. That’s the type of stuff that would be impossible without this new tech.

[u/Aclysmic]

Imagine a Spiderverse game with dimensional travel taking full advantage of PS5 hardware and next gen only. My eyes would melt.

[u/c2yCharlie]

Let Naughty Dog/Santa Monica reveal their true Next gen game and then we'll see more of the Iceberg. 😉

[u/metallophobic_cyborg]

Yeah, just wait until we start getting games made with nextgen engines like UE5. Games will start to near photo-realism.

[u/DanOfRivia]

That only makes me angrier/sadder about GoW being cross-gen.

[u/Select-Deer7961]

I meaaaaan obviously? When have the first games of a new console generation ever been the peak of the generation?

[u/morphinapg]

This game barely touches the PS5's power (hence why a 60fps mode is possible, because the CPU is hardly used). Even though it looks great, most of the game was developed before PS5 dev kits existed. Wait a couple years until we start getting games where most of the development was done on PS5 dev kits, then you'll see what this system can do.